Marketing needs augmented intuition says Calvin Klein CMO

DIGITAL marketing can be a misleading term when it comes to mapping out strategies.

In this digital era, the consumer journey involves many deviations from traditional modes, which means businesses need to combine the two for a smooth experience from start to finish to correspond with consumer behavior.

“It’s very duplicative to talk about traditional marketing and digital marketing,” said Calvin Klein CMO and PVH CDO Marie Gulin-Merle.

At Google Marketing Live event, Gulin-Merle explicitly explains why marketers should just see digital tools as the new normal for marketing instead.

Since the consumption of digital materials is present throughout the consumer journey, ‘digital marketing’ needs to be part of everything that ‘marketing’ does.

Whose responsibility is ‘marketing’?

‘Digital marketing’ is a transformative act that involves not only the marketing team but actually, the entire organization.

While the CEO will be leading the top-down movement, the responsibility of a CMO is to match and fine-tune the right technology to different consumer touchpoints.

Furthermore, with digital influence on sales growing stronger and stronger every day, businesses need to change how they operate and see their customers.

This applies across industries as all businesses are now scaling digital transformation respectively.

‘Return on relevance’ and the human element

Like all investments, businesses need to assess the gain from such moving to infuse digital into all its marketing efforts. However, instead of just measuring brand lift and sales, Gulin-Merle suggests businesses think about ‘return on relevance.’

“It’s a combination of engagements, past behaviors, and obviously, conversion.”

The metric is optimal for marketers as it measures one’s ability to provide the right content at the right time to the right consumer.

“At the end of the day, marketing is about ideas,” claimed Gulin-Merle. While big data and machine learning can automate what works and identify what does not, the digital thinker claims humans are irreplaceable.

It is the very human intuition that is not replicable by machines that will lead marketing into its next steps. Digital tools merely pull up the data sets.

This means to say that marketers will need to channel more creativity into their marketing efforts as automation settles mundane tasks.

“Creative teams cannot be afraid of tech, and that intuition — it is augmented by data and insights and technology.”

So, not only should brands allocate more manpower to develop better ideas, but also establish those ideas with data, insights, and technology. That’s the key to staying relevant for marketers.

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