Group CMO Of Saga Takes The Old Business On A New Journey

The needs of those aged 50 and over have changed considerably. Matt Atkinson has to figure out “how to hold the old world” and “introduce new capability.”

Marketing success within an organisation is now based on the internal partnerships it builds with IT, product, and operations.

That’s the view of Saga Group CMO Matt Atkinson, who spoke to CMO.com at Adobe Summit EMEA 2016 (Adobe is CMO.com’s parent organisation).

“The customer experience is important to all those parts of the business,” he said. “We all succeed or fail as a result of our ability to work together and understand each other.”

His comments come as Saga Group—an organisation that has been targeting and servicing the retired generation for 65 years—responds to a dramatic lifestyle shift from offline to multichannel among its consumer base.

With that come the technical and human challenges in balancing the old and the new. “As a business, we’ve got to work out how to hold the old world and keep it performing and introduce this new capability in a phased way.

“[You also need to] respect the fact someone is protecting the back door and keeping the business moving, and work out how to keep the new team moving, … and get them to value each other equally—otherwise you don’t get to the end-agenda in the way that anyone has planned.”