CMO and CIO collaboration key to business growth: report

The chief marketing officer and the chief information officer are two roles that ought to collaborate more. focusing on hybrid customer experience to grow their business, says a new Forrester report.

Why it matters

The pandemic has changed the CMO/CIO partnership, notes The CMO and CIO Partnership in Digital Transformation report. It is forcing marketing and IT to work more closely to achieve customer success while producing new opportunities for CMOs and CIOs to align their teams to accelerate digital transformation, especially around hybrid commerce. 

Key insights

• A strong partnership between marketing and technology is necessary, and while examples of great collaboration have been scarce, the pandemic closed the gap, with a third of B2C marketers saying in 2021 that CMOs and CIOs are strategic partners.
• The percentage who consider that marketing requests are a low priority for IT dropped from 23% in 2020 to 12% in 2021.
• Despite strong e-commerce growth, CMOs and CIOs need to focus on hybrid commerce to ignite their collaboration.
• CMO and CIO have to rethink the martech ecosystem to stay ahead of data deprecation – a good opportunity to collaborate.
• CMOs, CIOs may have different goals (eg brand perception vs platform security) but it is critical to co-own business KPIs.

Quote

“For years, IT was the one thing that kept me awake at night but now that we have elevated the CIO role at the executive committee level in all our markets, we have started working closely together and I have committed to help my peers by reducing our complex product and tariff portfolio” – Nikos Vlachopoulos, Global CMO, Vodafone.

Sourced from Forrester