More Than Just Software: A Complete Marketing Ecosystem
As technology increasingly shapes our everyday experiences, marketers must
develop and deploy a marketing ecosystem that provides the best possible
customer experience across channels and devices. To do so, they must assemble,
amplify, and repurpose data in real time, enabling artificial intelligence to fashion
more compelling offerings that will win customers over the long haul. This requires a
new perspective on marketing, a marketing ecosystem approach that focuses on
structured macro factors and associated megatrends that influence consumer
evolution. The ecosystem framework enables marketers to market-sense through
emergent, data-rich environments and bolster their capabilities for experimentation.
More Than Just Software: A Complete Marketing Ecosystem
The power of the ecosystem approach is that it enables marketing leaders to
develop and implement comprehensive strategies for engagement, loyalty, and
retention. And that, in turn, can improve business performance and drive customer
value. The problem is that many organizations struggle to grasp the scale of the
challenge. As a result, they often make one of two errors: either they focus too
narrowly on their own internal operations or they eschew the broader benefits that
the ecosystem can offer.
Both are dangerous missteps. The former results in a narrowing of the marketing
organization’s perspective, and the latter can lead to ill-thought-out or unfeasible
plans that are not grounded in realistic market conditions.
In our research, we have seen many examples of incumbents launching ecosystem
initiatives with a burst of enthusiasm and bold visions of combining forces along
value chains or pursuing attractive new markets. But these plans frequently stall
when they run into a series of challenges, both within their own walls and beyond
them.
A common error is to treat the marketing ecosystem as a collection of independent,
self-contained silos whose goal is to achieve individual channel gains. For example, a
bank may buff up its online-lending app with the hope that design tweaks and an
advertising push will attract borrowers from outside its core lending businesses and
geographies. Yet without lowering borrowing costs and making interactions easier,
such an app won’t deliver the essential virtuous cycle of ecosystem development
and growth.
This is a graphic of what the full marketing ecosystem might look like – it’s not that
different from the kaleidoscope of channels that every company has to deal with.
The challenge for marketers, and all other corporate functions, is to recognize and
harness the power of these multifaceted, interconnected, and ever-changing
megatrends.
Software is more than coding and programming; it represents an embodiment of the
process of data storage, query, algorithmic processing, interpretation, visualization,
and presentation. The world’s largest companies understand this well, and they
have built thriving businesses by orchestrating and participating in a host of digital
ecosystems.
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