Featuring:
Matt Guarini, VP, Senior Research Director and Thomas Husson, VP, Principal Analyst
Show Notes:
The pandemic proved the value of close marketing-technology collaboration, as companies successfully adapted retail experiences to online and hybrid models. That kind of agility and creativity will continue to be needed to meet rising customer expectations, differentiate products and services, and bring new offerings to market quickly. On this week’s podcast, VPs Matt Guarini and Thomas Husson explain why strong marketing-technology partnerships are imperative for business success.
Though many tech and marketing leaders recognize the need to collaborate, just one quarter of CIOs and CMOs recently interviewed by Forrester say their relationship is effective, Husson notes. “There may be a good individual relationship, but it doesn’t cascade down to the respective teams,” he says. Cultural and communication gaps are part of the reason — IT is sometimes still thought of as separate from the rest of the business, for instance, while the terminology used by tech and marketing teams can vastly differ.
And while the pandemic was a force multiplier, the need for effective collaboration will only become more acute in the years ahead. For marketers, challenges such as third-party cookie deprecation make partnering with their tech peers critical for finding new ways to gain customer insights. And for businesses as a whole, looming economic uncertainty makes collaboration vital.
“Knowing what your customers are going to want, knowing how other companies are going to respond, knowing where new competition is going to come from … the ability to stay ahead of that and to adapt is absolutely critical,” Guarini says. “That’s where the partnership becomes critical.”
Later in the episode, Guarini and Husson discuss how tech and marketing leaders should navigate economic downturns and success metrics that their teams can use to jointly evaluate their progress. Tune in to hear the full conversation.
