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Marketing Is a Digital Profession

The central idea of this book-that marketers can benefit by adopting management practices that were forged in the natively digital profession of software development-rests on the premise that marketing has become a digital profession itself.

You may have raised an eyebrow at that assertion. Certainly some elements of marketing are undeniably digital: websites, e-mail, online advertising, search engine marketing, and social media. These are the things that we have labeled as digital marketing over the past decade.

But there are still many other facets of marketing that don't appear to be digital in nature. Traditional TV, print, radio, and out-of-home advertising. Trade show events. In-store marketing. Public relations. Brand management. Channel management. Market research. Pricing. How can marketing be considered a digital profession when so many important components of it still operate outside the digital realm?

Marketing in a Digital World

When Clive Sirkin was named the chief marketing officer (CMO) of Kimberly-Clark-the company behind major brands such as Kleenex tissues, Huggies diapers, and Scott paper products-he remarked that it no longer believed in digital marketing but rather marketing in a digital world.1

It was a simple yet profound observation.

In most organizations, digital marketing grew up in a silo, separate from the rest of the marketing department. There were usually two reasons for this. First, most businesses didn't rely on digital touchpoints as the primary interface to their prospects and customers. Sure, they had a website, an e-mail subscription list, and maybe some online advertising, but those things weren't seen as the heart of the business. And second, digital marketing required a different set of skills, attracted different kinds of talent to its ranks, and often developed a different subculture from the rest of the marketing team. It was rarely well integrated with other marketing programs, usually had a small budget, and typically wielded little influence on marketing leadership.

But then the world changed.

Smartphones and tablets proliferated, all offering instant, high-speed connectivity to the Internet, wherever you were, whatever you were doing. Search engines, such as Google, became everyone's reflexive go-to source for answers to almost any question. Social media-Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Angie's List, Glassdoor, and hundreds of other specialized sites-triggered a worldwide explosion of information sharing. All kinds of apps, the tiny applications that we download on to our mobile devices, became an ambient part of our lives, at home, work, and school. We became continuously connected to the cloud.

Somewhere around 2012, we reached a tipping point. Digital channels and touchpoints were influencing people's buying decisions for all kinds of products and services, at every stage of the customer life cycle. Such digital interactions were no longer distinct moments either ("I'll go to my computer to check that out online"). They were interwoven into daily life, with the real world and digital world spilling into each other, like hot and cold water mixing in a bath.

Digital dynamics increasingly affected the real world.

This was the brilliant insight in Sirkin's statement. Once buyers stopped treating digital as an isolated channel, but rather as a universal source for information, on-demand service, and social validation for almost any purchase decision, brands that continued to relegate digital marketing to something separate from their core marketing mission would do so at their peril.

We're now marketers in a digital world.

Why Marketing Is Now a Digital Profession

Against the backdrop of a digital world, marketing has become a digital profession-and not just in the activities previously classified as digital marketing. There are many ways in which digital dynamics now pervade almost every corner of marketing.

First, the activities that we've explicitly thought of as digital marketing continue to grow as a percentage of marketing investment. The global media firm Carat has estimated that digital advertising spending is growing at double-digit rates, fueled mostly by growth in mobile and online video ads.2 Forrester Research expects that digital marketing spend will soon exceed TV advertising in the United States.3 According to an Econsultancy study, 77 percent of marketers increased their digital budgets last year.4 So obviously, the more purely digital marketing work we do, the more marketing is inherently a digital profession.

Second, marketing touchpoints in the real world are increasingly connected to the digital world. Quick response (QR) codes, one of the first inventions to bridge the digital and the physical, link printed materials to websites. Bluetooth beacons, installed in stores and at live events, automatically trigger offers and other location-based services for people on their mobile devices. Electronic tags attached to tangible goods and physical installations-using radio-frequency identification (RFID) or near field communication (NFC) technology-make them digitally visible for channel management, point-of-sale promotions, and postsale relationships with customers. Mobile apps produced by airlines, hotels, and retailers act on a consumer's global positioning system (GPS) location to enable special features and benefits. Wi-Fi-enabled appliances and gadgets are even creating new marketing touchpoints embedded in people's lives. A good example is the Amazon Dash Button, a physical button that consumers can press to instantly reorder common household goods, such as a Tide laundry detergent button affixed to their washing machine. So formerly nondigital marketing channels are acquiring digital dimensions for us to manage.

Third, digital business transformation-taking a nondigital business and remaking its offerings and operations to take advantage of digital technologies-now affects nearly every industry. Some of the most fascinating examples of this are digital layers juxtaposed on top of the physical world that have disrupted major markets. For instance, Uber rocked the taxi industry by using mobile apps, location data, and digital payments and profiles to orchestrate drivers and riders in a new kind of transportation network. (Taxis are now fighting back by deploying apps of their own.) But there are plenty of more mundane examples where consumers simply expect to be able to learn detailed information about a business and its offerings, conduct transactions, and resolve customer service issues on the Web or through a mobile app. These digital business features go beyond marketing, of course. But it is-or should be-marketing's responsibility to understand, champion, and promote this new wave of digitally enabled customer experiences.

Fourth, thanks to search engines and social media, even businesses with nothing digital about their actual products or services are affected by the way their companies are represented on the Internet. It's not just about what you officially publish online. It's mostly about what other people-customers, partners, employees, and influencers of all kinds-say about you on their blogs, in online reviews, and across social networks. Opinions of your business, good or bad, can be shared instantly, spread virally, and last forever in a Google search result. Everything you do in marketing today is subject to these digital feedback effects. You can spend months producing a high-end TV advertising campaign, but within minutes, your audience can commend or crucify you for it on social media, with far greater impact than the airtime you purchased. Marketing must be tuned into these digital conversations and be able to engage effectively with them.

And fifth, as Figure 2.1 shows, marketing now relies on a tremendous amount of digital infrastructure behind the scenes to manage its operations. As marketers, we're inundated with software applications in our daily work. Our toolbox has come a long way from containing simply Excel and Photoshop. Today, we use specialized software for analytics, campaign management, content management, digital asset management, programmatic advertising, customer relationship management, marketing resource management, and more. We are a digital profession in no small part because we spend so much of our day working with these digital tools. We're affected by the digital dynamics of those tools themselves-such as the rapid update cycles that software-as-a-service products typically have. But more important, these tools have the potential to give us digital leverage-speed, scale, adaptability, adjacency, and precision-in so many of our back-office processes.

Figure 2.1 Marketing Technology Landscape

Note: SEO stands for search engine optimization, VoC stands for voice of the customer, BI for business intelligence, CI for commercial intelligence, ESB for enterprise service bus, API for application programming interface, CRM for customer relationship management, IaaS for infrastructure as a service, and PaaS for platform as a service.

I say "potential" in that last sentence, because to achieve that digital leverage, we often have to...