In another installment of Speaker Spotlight, we posed a couple of our frequently asked questions to speaker Mayur Gupta, Global Head, Marketing Technology, Kimberly-Clark. We’ve included his answers here. Be sure to see additional Speaker Spotlights from our upcoming conference.

Mayur Gupta on Web Content Management at Gilbane Conference

Speaker Spotlight: Mayur Gupta

Global Head, Marketing Technology

Kimberly-Clark

 

 

Do you think “web content management” should be the hub of digital experience management implementations? If so, should it have a new name to match an expanded role? If not, what should be at the center?

It’s a great question. Often as marketers and technologists, we get excited with naming conventions & terminologies and get swayed away by new, shiny objects. Back to the question though, I strongly believe that there is no CENTER or HUB for digital experience management anymore, the entire ecosystem is the center. What does that mean? The challenge as well as the opportunity in the marketing technology landscape lies in the inter connectivity (data & context) between the different technology layers and components. It’s like a bicycle wheel with many cogs, Web content management or Digital Experience Management is just one of them, if you move the wheel forward or backward, you’ll have another cog appearing to be the center. For instance, data analytics & CRM is equally central to driving personalized consumer experiences but either of them (WCMS or Analytics) in isolation is incomplete. The simultaneous diversification and consolidation of various technology providers and platforms is an effort to address this challenge — making the ecosystem as the center instead of a particular technology or platform.

Is there a “Marketing Technologist” role in your organization or in organizations you know of? Should there be? What should their responsibilities be?

I head the global marketing technology capability @ Kimberly Clark, so in that regard yes we do have the “marketing technologist” role in our organization and we are expanding it each day. We are one of the very few Fortune 500 companies that have acknowledged the massive transformation in business at the intersection of Marketing & Technology, so I have a lot of respect for my leadership for being one of the pioneers in this space. Having said that, “marketing technology” as a role is just a nomenclature, what is critical is the concept of “marketing technology” as a capability, regardless of organizational boundaries, titles and ownerships.

Marketing technology is a progressive outcome of the dramatic evolution in the digital landscape within the last decade, with an extremely demanding, strong and in-control consumer at the epicenter. This evolution and innovation has reduced the conventional gulf between consumer experiences, marketing strategies and technologies that enable them to the extent that technology itself is the experience now. We can no longer define brand strategies in isolation from technology or build technology roadmaps without connecting it to consumer experiences that enable brand strategies. And, that is the role of a “marketing technologist” – connecting & combining brand strategies, creative consumer experiences with emerging and innovative technologies. Besides the technology landscape itself, marketing technology demands a more agile, nimble and lean perspective to technology innovation and adoption and therefore it requires more of a behavioral, mindset and cultural shift as compared to the conventional ways of technology delivery.

Marketing technology is no longer an option but a necessity for brands that want to market in a digital world and engage with a digital consumer anytime anywhere & every time everywhere.

Catch Up with Mayur at Gilbane

Track C: Content, Marketing, and the Customer Experience

C1. Q&A with Real Live Marketing Technologists
Tuesday, December, 3: 1:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.

Follow Mayur on Twitter – @inspiremartech.