The CMO Agenda: Big Data, Regulations, and the Power of Human Connections

I left BCG’s most recent global partner and board meeting flooded with ideas that I can bring back to our clients and teams, excited about the new concepts I’d learned—and more aware than ever of what should be top of mind for me and, perhaps, other chief marketing officers in our roles today.

Customization—and the Weight of Brand

Europe’s GDPR will likely influence changes to come in other markets around the world. CMOs have to be not only compliant but cognizant of how we responsibly market and customize what we offer.

Many consumers won’t object if a company knows what they’re interested in and how they behave—as long as the result is better information, offers, and services. If consumers give their permission—opting in—it is essential that marketers then improve the consumer experience. When that happens, it creates two-way trust—and a potentially long-lasting relationship.

The brand is still king—perhaps more so than ever as new regulations go into effect. Marketers must focus with great clarity on making sure that their offering shines through the clutter that’s out there, so that consumers recognize it as the message that they want to receive.

Building Relationships Through a Menu-Based Approach

BCG’s global partner and board meeting has changed drastically since I first attended in 1995. In those days, as old-fashioned as it sounds, the partners navigated the events in a predictable way. We’d be given a folder with the schedule upon our arrival, and each morning we’d pick up our papers for the day. This year, we had over 1,000 partners participating, dozens and dozens of discussion sessions to choose from, and a custom app—updated throughout the meeting—to keep it all sorted and to keep us informed and engaged.

The meeting has become much more complicated—a result of the increased breadth and depth of the firm’s work—and thus more customized for the participants. As a consumer, I am faced with a menu of offerings that are competing for my attention, and—aside from the larger group-wide plenary presentations—it’s up to me to orchestrate my own activities: a create-your-own experience. How do I know what to choose? Each possibility has to be presented in a “grabby” way for me—so that I end up following the path that will teach me the most and be most relevant to my work, even if it’s a topic I know little about ahead of time.

The takeaway from a marketing perspective was clear. Today, we have to work with a menu-based approach—targeting consumers who have smaller appetites than they used to—shorter attention spans. CMOs have to face the challenge of communicating through sound bites. And when we get it right—when it’s relevant and digestible—our audience will invest more time with us and come back again and again.

When Physical Outsmarts Digital

The potential of big data and artificial intelligence is undeniable. Analysis that would have taken months to complete during my early days at BCG is now finished in a relative heartbeat by BCG Gamma or other data scientists—as well as by our consultants, who are armed with powerful desktop programs. With AI and other tools, we can become better businesspeople and make better decisions, cost effectively and without delay.

While the promise of this science is real, people, of course, remain at the core of our work. At the end of a digital-shopping experience, there is a much-awaited physical delivery. At our meeting, I attended an immersion session on AI and blockchain, and it became clear to me that leveraging the power of these technologies carefully and thoughtfully still requires a human touch to truly unlock the potential inside many traditional organizations today. Google Senior Research Scientist Margaret Mitchell’s powerful TED@BCG talk—How We Can Build AI to Help Humans, Not Hurt Us—reminds us that AI is in its infancy, and that we can push it on a path that benefits us in the end. Human participation is essential.

All of this brings me back to the changes I’ve witnessed in my decades of work at BCG. My children are astounded when I describe the research I did as a young associate in Tokyo—heading to an industry association library, where I was not allowed to make Xeroxes of pages but had to sit down and copy out postwar industry shipment numbers by hand. (“Couldn’t you just take a picture of the pages?” they ask!) Now we run models that process these numbers in seconds for us.

But despite the dramatic changes—evident in how even BCG’s internal officers meeting was marketed to us this year—we still need the human connection. We could have presented the same agenda to our partners around the world through a massive videoconference or a MOOC (which we also utilize as a medium). But we choose to come together in person each time, navigating from topic to topic as well as toward one other—a connection that brings value like nothing else.