Marketing leaders must be conductors who orchestrate the differentiated experience as the primary driver of competitive advantage for their insights-led, fast and connected brands in today’s age of the customer.
That’s the view of prominent marketer Mitchell Mackey, who says we must be committed to operating at the intersection of marketing and technology.
“Translating the rhetoric of ‘customer-first’ into meaningful action and overcoming legacy attitudes remains hugely challenging for traditionally-structured companies,” Mitchell says.
“Marketing and IT has to get into bed together and start collaborating effectively. We must drop the phrase ‘digital marketing’. All marketing and sales activity is digitally enabled. We don’t need a ‘digital strategy’ today. We need strategies to succeed in the digital world that is all around us, where meaningful, sustainable and profitable differentiation can be achieved only by an obsessive focus on the digitally-enabled customer experience, with digitally-literate marketers and business technology (not old-school IT) specialists collaborating together around a shared vision and purpose.”
Mitchell says marketers must start accepting direct accountability for originating, retaining and influencing revenue.
“There are too many conventional finance and legal people filling C level and Board positions in our companies today and not enough innovative marketers who truly understand the customer and can connect the dots with revenue,” Mitchell says.
“Finance and legal skills sets are essential of course but fundamentally they are commodity assets you can source almost anywhere. Marketing is where the action must be.”
Mitchell is a global, commercial marketing executive with a record of delivering for Mercedes-Benz, Ansell and professional services consultancies.
Prior to joining Ansell Limited, where he is their Marketing Director, Mitchell enjoyed nine years with Mercedes-Benz in global, regional and national marketing roles. The experience, which included four years at headquarters in the southern German city of Stuttgart, was a privilege.
However, it wasn’t all premium branding and luxury cars. As one of the few native English speakers on the German side, Mitchell witnessed and learned all about the importance of change management from the slow-motion train accident that unfolded when Board and C-level hubris inspired Mercedes-Benz’s flawed Chrysler acquisition that began in 1998 and ended in 2007.
Back in Australia, Mitchell has been recognized by CMO magazine as one of the nation’s top 50 marketers in both 2015 and 2016.
And now that it has sold off its B2C condom business, Ansell is a dedicated safety company focused on the healthcare and industrial sectors. A $A 2bn global, Australian-listed enterprise, with a century-old brand heritage, Ansell manufactures approximately 80% of what it sells at factories in Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Korea, Sri Lanka, Mexico and Portugal.
Mitchell says the Ansell team is proud of the fact that they are not in the widget or sugar-flavored water business, that they are in the business of protecting workers.
At Ansell Mitchel is mandated to drive the global evolution of Ansell’s integrated engagement platform (web + marketing automation + CRM and analytics), fuelled by aligned processes and people, which synchronizes with the transactional ERP system of record to unleash a dynamic customer acquisition and retention engine.
The business goals are defined by the urgent need to drive down Ansell’s disintermediation risk, reduce churn, revitalize the customer experience and accelerate the transition to a genuine, digitally-enabled business environment.
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