If CMOs associated German software giant SAP with great marketing at all, it might have been for its long-running “The best-run businesses run on SAP” campaign. Maggie Chan Jones is trying to change that.
In a recent online clip, the business applications provider features its own chief marketing officer wandering the rooftop of a skyscraper, outlining what she identifies as her peers’ greatest challenges and how her own firm’s products and services could help.
“CMOs in all industries are looking at technology to drive insight for them to build better customer experiences and brand engagement” she says. “We need fantastic storytellers coupled with the data scientists who can see the patterns and insights through the numbers.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, each of the key challenges Chan Jones identifies is linked to one of SAP’s own products. This includes Hybris, which is designed to manage customer data and which Chan Jones said could offer CMOs their long-sought 360-degree view of customers. Hana, SAP’s in-memory database system, could be a foundational piece for firms that want to personalize communications and market to an audience of one, she said.
Chan Jones even uses SAP’s annual user conference, Sapphire Now, as an example of how brands could bridge the physical and virtual worlds by discussing its use of beacon technology to track attendee behaviour.
As a longtime provider of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software that runs the back end operations of large companies all over the world, SAP has traditionally marketed itself primarily to chief information officers (CIOs) and IT departments. Like rivals Oracle, IBM and Microsoft, however, there is a growing recognition that the key decision maker for several important application areas has moved to the CMO’s office, and having a representative member of its target audience is a natural way to deliver the message.
SAP has created an online resource centre, The Future of CMOs, with research and other tools aimed at an executive audience.
