The job of marketing has become more complex, both in-house and outside the company, says Vivek Bapat, senior VP and global head of marketing strategy at the technology company SAP. The future of technology marketing demands agility and collaboration, he said.
During a break at the recent Financial Time’s Future of Marketing Summit, Bapat spoke about the three sources of complexity marketers face internally, today’s more complex customer journey, and what he called the B2B2C communication—business to business to consumer—which needs to take place today.
Velocitize: How has technology marketing become more complex?
Bapat: When I define complexity, I locate it in two forms, internal and external. You put marketing in the middle of it and you have to serve all these different points of complexity.
In the past, the role of marketing was fairly straightforward: Build awareness for our brands, get me the leads, and then the sales organization closes them and builds revenue. Now, the role of marketing is much broader and more complex.
From a stakeholder perspective, the CEO—the C-suite—wants to build the brand equity for the company over time. From a revenue perspective, you are always under quarterly pressure. You must help me drive demand so I can close business and build revenue today.
The shelf life of technology is six months. Any innovation that you bring into the market is going to be obsolete in six month’s time. There’s a huge pressure on marketing to always stay current, and keep positioning the company in a fast-evolving market.
These three things put together are a completely different set of internal complexities that you didn’t really have 10-15 years ago.
From an external complexity perspective, what customers buy has changed. A lot of it, especially in technology, has moved to a subscription model. You don’t want to own technology; you want to rent it.
How they buy has changed. It’s not linear anymore. There’s no funnel. We stopped talking about the funnel five years ago. It’s a journey now and every customer takes their own journey.
So what they buy has changed, how they buy has changed, and who they buy from has changed, because there’s a whole lot of new competitors that are always clamoring for them.
Velocitize: How has the customer journey changed?
Bapat: A customer moves though different phases. There’s awareness, when I’m aware of your product. I’m going to consider it. I’m going to buy it. I’m going to use it, and maybe I’m going to be an advocate for it. Customers will jump in at different points and move, not in a sequential way, but maybe move from consideration to use, or they might go from consideration to advocacy.
This portion is still very strictly business-to-business: consideration to buy. Why? Because it’s a complicated decision. Buying enterprise technology is not like making a decision on: do I take a cab or should I order an Uber?
And when you buy, you want to get an experience that is very consumer-centric as well. The difference between what people will think of “Oh, I’m using this technology for work” versus “I’m just using it for fun”—that difference has evaporated.
What you see is still core B2B behavior, but when you look at everything else around it, that is being consumer-driven. Awareness is consumer-driven, because people are doing searches on the web; they’re doing self-discovery. Advocacy is too: they’re sharing with their peers.
This is what I call B2B2C. It changes the way you think about this, because in the past we were only focused on this piece—awareness to consideration. Now we have to focus on everything, starting from buying to usage to advocacy.
Velocitize: So you’re not just talking to the industry, but also to your customer’s customer?
Bapat: We have to be able to serve this buyer in a way that says: “Look, I’m going to give you some value so you can run your business efficiently, but in addition to doing that, look at all these new things that you can do for your customer.”
In storytelling, what we do is we tell the story from C to B to B. I’ll give you an example: shea nut farmers in Ghana. SAP helped empower them with mobile technology. They were able to take the produce and serve it up to a much broader market, which drove prices up. We helped the local women entrepreneurs earn more money, so they were able to send their children to school.
Our customer was the government, but the end recipient was the shea nut farmer. Telling the story from the shea nut farmer’s perspective gives you an opportunity to tell a much bigger story about how technology helps improve people’s lives.
Velocitize: Does that force a marketer to be agile and empower your people to adapt?
Bapat: We have to absolutely be flexible. I talk about the idea of “live business,” which is business in the moment.
We have a similar sort of vision for marketing. It is about how can we become the best example of “live marketing.”
One of the examples might be how we are going to be immersed in a conversation with customers on all channels. Whether it’s Instagram or Twitter, whether it’s LinkedIn or Facebook, we are immersed in those conversations.
We have moved a lot of our point of view and our communications in the market into native digital social and mobile content, because we want to make it consumable. One example was the Digitalist magazine, which is providing outside point of view about what’s important to customer. It’s not an SAP-centric point of view.
Velocitize: Have you also found agility has to be a priority internally?
Vivek Bapat: You have to have the nimbleness to change your marketing mix some times, if there’s a new competitive product that comes up, or if there’s an issue that you want to reinforce in the market. From a strategy perspective, what we try to do is to reserve some amount of money where we can redirect things, in order to handle all these kinds of real-time issues that may come up.
We also believe very strongly that 84,000 employees of SAP can become the biggest brand advocates of the company. We promoted very significantly employee journalism, brand journalism, so we give them a platform to promote their thoughts. We’ve invested a significant amount of money in terms of evangelizing the purpose of the company.
We’re not just communicating a message about helping improve people’s lives, but we’re actually doing it and we’re actually showing how we’re doing it. The shift that’s happened in our customers’ landscape is that they’re not just looking for efficiency and standarization within their business, but they’re looking at transforming their business model itself.
(For example) Blockchain is going to potentially change the way that the whole financial system works. Lots of people are talking about blockchain; what SAP has done is put two or three companies together and demonstrate how a transaction with Blockchain can actually happen.
What we try to do in these scenarios is we employ design thinking, a process where we sit down with a customer—in this case it’s a bank—we pull in their end customer and ask: What kind of future do you envision? So we have a collaborative relationship and discussion on both our customer and their customer. It’s a proactive way of thinking about the future, instead of reacting.
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