Digital marketing transformation: Post-modern marketing’s endgame

IDC says businesses will spend $1.25 trillion on digital transformation, worldwide, in 2019, climbing to $2 trillion in 2022. Digital transformation has become synonymous with business transformation. And with digital business transformation, of course, comes digital marketing transformation.

But the hard fact is, in both cases – digital business transformation and digital marketing transformation – most organizations have barely scratched the surface. There are hundreds of articles explaining why, citing things like resistance to change, being unaware of the needed foundational shift in how people work and collaborate, the challenge of wholesale cultural change, failure to align technology with business goals, all the way down to the quality of an organization’s data.

There is much, much more transformational work to be done before post-modern marketing and post-modern business become mainstream.

Post-modern marketing demands stronger results, measurable return-on-investment, and greater efficiency and scalability. It requires connecting and personalizing the customer experience. And, importantly, it means bringing together marketing “science” – all that still-advancing technology – with marketing “art” – creativity that touches human souls – to transform go-to-market approaches. It’s the necessary reinvention of marketing that helps lead digital businesses to post-modern prosperity.

Mapping the road to digital marketing transformation

For the past 20 years, the authors of Paradox have helped brands transition through the constantly changing digital- and tech-enabled landscape, fusing Modern Marketing technologies with bold, intuitive and emotionally driven creative and content experiences. Out of all that work and client experience emerged the Digital Marketing Transformation Framework (DMTF).

Our DMTF is a roadmap to help you connect all the necessary digital marketing transformation dots…to connect strategy to creativity to content to the right marketing technologies and frameworks. As with an actual roadmap, the DMTF starts with a destination (the business and marketing strategic future you envision) and a starting point (your current state of digital post-modern marketing maturity).

“You have to start with your business and marketing vision, of course, because you have to have a very clear idea of where you want to go,” says Marc Keating, Stein IAS’ chief innovation officer and the primary driver behind the DMTF. “But then, you must get very quickly to the first couple of turns – the transformations you can effect today that put you on the right path to your ultimate vision.”

DMTF utilizes an extraordinary mapping tool to identify those first few turns (as well as subsequent turns): an ever-evolving repository of more than 100 use cases. Rather than evaluate martech for martech’s sake or individual components of the tech stack in isolation, these use cases compel marketers to start with their desired end game and then help them to define the “right path” through the multitude of available tactics and technologies to arrive at their business and marketing vision.

Marketing organizations with the will and rigor to navigate digital transformation roadmaps like the DMTF outlined in Chapter 8 will begin to leave the rest behind. The experiences they offer to customers will become “intelligent,” powered by intuitive creative that touches peoples’ souls and the next round of martech just beginning to be deployed.

Says Keating, “Post-Modern Marketing requires full digital transformation – but also the re-connection of digital marketing to the emotional and iconic appeal of the ‘Mad Men.’ And that’s precisely the paradox that gives this book its name.”