Pawan Awasthi, Head - Enterprise Marketing Asia South, NVIDIA 

“The most important role marketing can play is to be the voice of the customer, walk in their shoes, and bring that to the rest of the organization. CMOs uniquely represent the voice of the customer, the deep understanding of whom is critical to business success today.

Probably the most important element of marketing’s digital transformation is that the marketing department is no longer a show-and-tell function, but it’s a relationship function. Marketing departments need to use technology, first and foremost, for communication. And we need to make sure they are grabbing valuable customer insights from every exchange.

That brings us to data. Every time a customer interacts with a brand through their journey from discovery to possible evangelism, the marketing team must be using that exchange for the purpose of making the customer experience better. They need to nab more than just numbers and customer loyalty points. Emotions should be recorded in some way too. Marketing departments then need to plug all that knowledge back into the customer journey flow through personalization.

That’s where automation comes in. Automation allows marketing departments to fill the gap where human effort simply can’t function.”