We recently hosted the latest in our series of customer-focused events on “Why marketers need to be married to Tech”. Our panel of technology and marketing leaders discussed a host of topics, culminating in the debate of whether companies are technology-led or customer-led, spoiler alert, it is perhaps neither.
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Matthew Bushby is the Chief Marketing Officer at Rightmove. Matt is a senior marketing leader who has run and promoted high-growth and profitable online businesses.
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Elen Macaskill is the Chief Customer Officer at bp pulse. Elen has 20 years of digital, marketing, and general management experience in FMCG, direct-to-customer, and transformational businesses.
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Peter Donlon is the Group Chief Technology Officer at Moonpig. Peter is responsible for web engineering, app development, production engineering and architecture.
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Kristof Fahy is Group Chief Marketing Officer at Moonpig. Kristof brings over 25 years of experience in the successful creation and implementation of commercial, digital, marketing, and brand strategies.
One of the key elements to building a successful relationship between the two functions, is mutual understanding and respect. The panel reflected that it’s very easy to stand in a swim lane, building an understanding of how marketing works, or how technology works. The best functional leaders think laterally, demonstrating a deeper curiosity of how to make marketing and product work, which is reciprocated between both parties.
The chicken or the egg question. Unsurprisingly the panel were split, and if there was a winner, it was sales. A nuanced but important point was the need to differentiate between product management as a capability and product as a customer facing solution. Ultimately customers and product are owned by everybody in the organisation, with all stakeholders having the right to influence. Take the example above of dark patterns. These are proven to have a short-term uplift in sales, however they are often bad for customer experience and are lines of code that the tech team needs to write, distracting from long-term projects. Shared ownership of product and the customer will minimise poor customer experience and reduce short-term thinking.