CMO-CIO Partnership: One handshake. Many benefits

There was a time, not so long ago, when the CIO and CMO ran their respective fiefdoms, and exchanging little more than polite nods at those quarterly executive meetings and annual holiday parties. In recent times, with digital reinvention permeating every industry, function, and experience, marketing too has been almost unrecognizably digitized. Although, at first, marketers themselves managed the choice, purchase and maintenance of their automation portfolio, the increasing complexity and fast-paced changes in the digital landscape has quickly led them to see the advantages of collaborating with the tech wizards in their ecosystem. On the other hand, the CIO has come to realize that marketers have their fingers on customers’ pulse and if customer experience must be digitized, it’s the CMO who knows what is most likely to work. Suddenly, from virtually no reason to converge, virtual has become the very reason for CIOs and CMOs to partner for success.

As COVID-19 swept across the world upending lives and livelihoods, everything from consumer buying habits to workforce management underwent a sea change, leaving enterprises scrambling to find ways to cope. Firms with well-synced CIO-CMO collaboration started off tackling the challenge with a distinct advantage. And, I believe, this edge spans four dimensions in particular:

Resilience. Never before the pandemic have enterprises been tested so severely for their ability to run the business in the face of massive operational disruption and demand to stretch organizational boundaries seamlessly. Every function in the organization stepped up – not just to execute on its own mandate, but to support the other functions and help the organization respond as one cohesive entity to the situation that defied every known playbook. It was up to the CIO to rise to the business resilience challenge. At the same time, it was up to the brand to wear a brave face and be the voice of hope and reason countering fear and uncertainty. The CMO had to help the brand summon a broader empathetic and human response to employees, customers, investors and the community at large. And together the duo – CIO virtualizing the employee and customer value chain for contactless business, and CMO orchestrating the narrative of the company’s resilience across choice channels and to all stakeholders – helped so many organizations weather those early months when the novel virus first wreaked havoc.

Experience. One of the respondents in a recent survey we conducted to study CMO and C-Suite partnerships said, “Consumers have long memories. How brands perform in a crisis is going to stay in people’s minds for a long, long time.” Marketing is adept at nurturing consumer connections and that’s exactly what needs to be done authentically, but also efficiently through pervasive digital means, in tough times. Undoubtedly, CMOs and CIOs that collaborated extensively, in some cases for the very first time in meaningful ways, were able to drive most value for their organizations. One simple but telling example from the earlier part of the year is how our marketing team collaborated with our technology platforms group. We worked together to bring the experiential rigors of world class events to client collaborations. Together, we conceptualized and launched our own virtual events platform in a matter of weeks - at a time when the only way we could meet-up with clients was virtually.

Purpose. This is also the time when brands are keenly judged against the purpose they have always espoused. Any contradiction to the claim will not only result in short term brand bashing but also long term brand damage. The CIO-CMO collaboration stands organizations in good stead in this context as well. For example, as thousands of schools across the United States closed due to social distancing norms, Infosys Foundation USA opened its Pathfinders Online Institute - powered by our own digital learning platform Wingspan - to teachers, parents and students giving them access to high-quality computer science education content from home for free in a virtual classroom. We also offered Wingspan to some of our clients to help them accelerate digital learning for their remote-working employees at a time when they needed to quickly build digital muscle. A true come-together of technology and purposeful branding.

Oneness. A culture of collaboration does not just happen by chance, proximity or osmosis. However, when marketing and technology leaders converge, a broader culture of shared strategy and capability is often the happy result. For example, this collaboration at Infosys has further strengthened the sales and marketing relationship as we have integrated client intelligence with insights extracted from internal and external systems to help sales teams sell more effectively.

While these past months have catalyzed a stronger handshake between tech teams and marketing, the true potential of the collaboration will continue to mature and grow for businesses after the crisis, in the next normal, when we will all have transitioned from ‘respond’ to ‘reimagine’. And when the story of this shared digital reinvention will need to be rewritten and retold.