These three projects are targeted at answering the age-old marketing question, through scale, of engaging the ‘right customer’ in the ‘right place’ with the ‘right content’ and at the ‘right time’. Infusing this activity with a proactive attitude and commitment to incremental testing, enhances these marketing efforts and moves marketing teams away from a fragmented ‘order optimised by channel’ approach. It allows us to create a holistic customer lifetime value approach, which brings individual Marketing teams together and ensures customer experience is put first.

On Stakeholder alignment

Successful MarTech does not work if a marketing function is not aligned to the business, which means stakeholder management and change management beyond marketing teams or functions is crucial. This needs to go deeper and be more consistent than budget conversations or campaign reporting - it requires on-going collaborative engagement. For example, actively engaging legal or finance functions on the right identification and tender process steps for a new marketing technology or tool is as important as is aligning with the tech product or IT teams. In this case, alignment is not just about ensuring technical know-how or compatibility, it is about understanding how a new tool relates to existing platforms, the wider technology ecosystem of your organisation and how it complies with your company’s operational policies, which for us was the approach we adopted when introducing our Single Customer View platform. Understandably, business alignment is always going to have its challenges due to the size or scale of your organisation. With THE ICONIC growing to over 1,000 employees in just eight year, we certainly understand there are challenges, yet it does not make alignment any less important.

On Learning Mindset

Technical know-how of marketing team members is also fundamental, as is their knowledge of platforms and how these fit within the technology ecosystem of the business. We are nurturing a learning culture at THE ICONIC. And for our marketing function to be successful, we ensure all team members - from senior leadership all the way through to our graduate team members - are being educated to develop a data-driven mindset because customer experience is built upon understanding the customer’s needs and behaviours. The additional benefit of improving our marketing team members’ understanding of data, means we move away from completely relying on data scientists. This allows team members to develop their own insights and for the data teams, it frees them up to focus on more strategic projects, for example Customer Lifetime Value model builds. This learning mindset also extends to our Creative Marketing team - for example, our entire in-house creative team (even our graphic designers) are being (or have been) trained on our Single Customer View tool, Lexer. By technically upskilling and improving the technical know-how of our marketing function, not only are we developing our team member’s skills, we are increasing cross-functional collaboration. You never know where the best ideas may come from and if a graphic designer understands how an SEM manager builds a customer segment or campaign, greater alignment between teams and better outcomes are achieved - this stands to ultimately benefit our customers and their experience.

In 2018, THE ICONIC added over 200 new brands onsite, with a total of over 1,000 brands and 60,000 products, and over 200 new products added each day. Without a modern MarTech approach built on collaborative alignment with the entire business, consideration of our ecosystem and increasing the technical expertise of our marketing team to create seamless customer experiences, our success in marketing our incredible product offering would be significantly hampered. At THE ICONIC, we understand these fundamental elements to MarTech are crucial to ensuring we stay true to our customer-first focus, while supporting the business through strategic, considered and efficient marketing activity execution.

With our approach to MarTech, we are able to truly connect our brand purpose of ‘Liberation’ to business realities, and ultimately help drive human connectivity between our people, our customers and our partners through everything we do.