For years, experts have predicted that digital was going to be the demise of face-to-face marketing. However, customers clearly value both their online and offline experiences. They are continuously engaging with your company and consuming your corporate story through a multitude of channels. To them, it is not about online and offline. It’s about the end-to-end experience one company delivers over another and how customers cast their votes with dollars.
The good news is, CMOs and CEOs are catching up with customer thinking. This is causing them to rethink how they can deliver a clear, connected, compelling experience regardless of whether dimensions of that experience are delivered online or offline. In fact, findings from the Gartner 2015–2016 Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Spend Survey found that the term “digital marketing” is on the wane. The survey also found that, “98 percent of CMOs no longer make a clear distinction between marketing online and offline and say the disciplines are merging.”
The key message from the Gartner Report is the “disciplines are merging.” This means the process of looking at the online and offline journeys as two distinct and separate things is changing. However, this change is occurring in a slow and limited fashion. The truth is most marketing organizations are still functionally and operationally divided. There is a digital team and an events team. Worse yet, there is also a content team, lead qualification team, brand team and more. You get the point. The gap between online and offline will not be fully closed until CMOs reshape how they structure, manage and orchestrate the customer journey from a marketing operations, strategic planning and execution perspective. Maybe, that’s why Forrester Research said, “Marketers must put 2016 budgets to work on shifting interactions seamlessly between digital and physical contexts.”
Online and offline dimensions of the customer experience are intrinsically connected. And both are going to grow more and more interdependent. This is reality. We now work and live in the new experience economy. An economy where buying decisions and dollars flow in the direction of companies that deliver a superior end-to-end customer experience. Only those CMOs who embrace this reality and establish complete alignment across every dimension of the customer experience will win.
