In the past 30 years, waves of new technologies roughly occurring once every decade have transformed different functions within global enterprises. For example, in the 1990s we saw the rise of Supply Chain and ERP companies such and i2, JD Edwards and SAP, while the 2000s was the decade of enterprise transformation driven by automation of Sales functions by Salesforce.com, and HR functions by PoepleSoft. Each of these companies eventually grew up to be billion-dollar entities in the decade following their birth.
Of the major corporate functions, marketing and legal are the last bastions suitable for technology driven transformation. Marketing functions are relatively inefficient (i.e., the famous quip about 50% of marketing being waste), and so far, have not been a candidate for transformation for the following reasons:
- Marketing organizations have been historically been siloed, with Brand/ PR, CRM, Lead gen etc. largely operating as independent functions
- Marketing data not shared across functions, leading to inefficiency in decision making
- Given limited cross-functional cooperation with the marketing organization, inefficient processes set up over a period of time within functions, leading to further inefficiency
Given the history and the cultural context, the first generation of marketing enterprise companies have focused on process improvements within a function, such as CRM. It has been the "easy win", given that the creating a common technology and data platform to drive greater efficiency would have been much more difficult given the historical aversion to sharing information within the marketing organizations.
However, in the past few years, availability of social media data and "big data" computing has emerged as potential enabler for building a new generation of marketing enterprise technologies and companies that will help drive major transformations.
How will big data and social media enable the transformation? External social data, not being "owned" by the marketing organization, can be the glue that binds several multiple marketing functions. Social insights and data are already impacting functions such as brand marketing and CRM. As more contextual data becomes available, driven by big data technologies and real-time analytics, we expect the data and technology will be the tail that will wag the dog, i.e., enable the transformations of the marketing organizations. If history is any indicator, expect billion-dollar marketing enterprise technology companies to be created and the numbers to rise steadily over the next decade.