What are your biggest opportunities & challenges for the next 12-24 months?
Our biggest opportunity today is to change the way marketers think about marketing — which doesn’t happen very often. It’s a once-in-a-generation opportunity. We’re trying to shift away from marketing at consumers, to communication with them. The reason we can do this today is because of the data that we can now collect on consumers — with their permission — is more granular than ever. Once personal communication begins to take hold in the mainstream, marketing will never be the same. The challenges will be on marketers to catch up and master this new approach before their competitors do.
What keeps your clients up at night?
Again, no one wants to fall behind. The world is rapidly changing and innovating, and there are new demands on marketers to keep abreast of the new technologies that might hurt them (for example, ad blocking) and the new technologies that can help them — for example, communication automation, the technology that my company has pioneered.
What’s the hardest thing to educate a client about?
I would frame the question in a different way and ask, “What’s the one thing our clients really need to learn?” The answer: marketers need to think of automation technology as a strategic capability, not a tactical tool. The number one asset for company is its brand, so it’s natural that CMOs — the people I speak with every day — prioritize their work around creating the brand experience, protecting the brand experience, and extending the many ways that brand experience can be shared. What many CMOs today don’t know is that communication automation gives them ability to create branded experiences for their customers — experiences that compel customers to buy, to return, and, yes, to refer others, the key to viral growth — in a personalized and scalable way. This is the reason why automation is such a hot technology category. It’s not at the bottom (tactical) of the marketing tech food chain, but at the very top (strategic).
What are some of the unmet needs in the marketing technology landscape?
I would say that it’s not so much what’s missing, but more about educating marketers about what’s already there. As William Gibson said in another context, “the future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
What social network do you anticipate accelerating growth in the next year?
I have to say that Facebook continues to impress. It was only a couple of weeks ago they announced that 1 billion users from its 1.5 billion active accounts signed in on one single day. That’s one out of seven of all people on earth. But what’s less known is the art and science that Facebook has long applied to growing its phenomenal user base.
My CEO, Adam Marchick, was part of the original Facebook growth team, and he helped bring some of that art and science into the Kahuna platform. So, let me answer the question this way. The “social network” I anticipate accelerating growth in the next year may very well be your company’s own social network with the help of communication automation.
–Julie Ginches is CMO at Kahuna
