Companies have been leveraging digital channels such as banner ads, email, and software tools like CRM to reach customers for years. But SAP’s Chief Digital Marketing Officer is a newly created, one year-old position - highlighting the critical role that digital has recently assumed within the world of marketing.
Mika Yamamoto is the first and only person to have held this title at SAP, and the first CDMO that I have ever met. She took over the role from her prior position as Chief Marketing Officer of SAP SMB, again showing the primacy of digital within forward thinking organizations. Her charge is to optimize and align all of a company’s investments in digital assets and channels to drive greater profitability.
Yamamoto’s career arc has informed her approach to this task. From her very first job after college, she learned that data is critical to identifying, testing and measuring success. But that data alone is useless without the understanding of human nature and tendencies. So today, she seeks to underpin her digital-first strategy at SAP with offline insights into the relationships customers hold with companies.
Yamamoto did not arrive to her role via a traditional technology path. She attended college to pursue degrees in economics and psychology. Her first job out of school was as a consultant, focusing on change management in the banking industry.
Coming during the era of bank mergers, her job was to find a way to make the two entities better together. She quickly learned that effectively combining sometimes disparate cultures was critical to these mergers, and that understanding motivations and relationships helped best align them in service to customers and shareholders.
Next, Yamamoto joined the analyst group Gartner, focusing on research into how small and medium businesses invested in technology. Large vendors like Microsoft, Cisco and SAP used her insights to optimize products and solutions to meet those unique business needs. Much of her recommendations at Gartner revolved around the use of data to make better decisions and realize improved outcomes.
Eventually, Yamamoto joined the Windows product management team at Microsoft. There, she helped Microsoft manage the consumer shift from desktops to laptops, and sparked the company’s journey into retail. In fact, Yamamoto was employee number five at Microsoft stores.
Her job was to understand the needs and tendencies of both business and consumer customers. She leaned heavily on data to identify and track trends, but she never forgot the important role emotions and human behaviors played in shopping decisions. Together, this marriage of data and behavioral understanding helped her create exceptional customer experiences.
Yamamoto moved on to help Amazon establish Amazon Books, their first brick and mortar bookstore. Her team relied on data insights to design the store - for example, where to place books and signage based on book buying metrics. But they also turned to decidedly offline methods to confirm their assumptions. Her team used cameras to monitor customers interactions within the store and then reconfigured their original layouts accordingly.
This combined offline and online tracking helped build a superior customer experience that contributed to increased sales and return visits. That integrated marketing discipline forms the basis of Yamamoto’s approach in her current role at SAP today.
She understands that data allows her to neutralize negative interactions and instead focus conversations on positive outcomes. As a team leader, she can objectively determine what the customer actually desires and needs versus hearsay or conjecture. In conversations with SAP customers and different business line owners within an organization, she can also use data as a common language to align everyone behind a shared goal.
Ultimately, Yamamoto is committed to using technology to scale connections to customers. What today is a potent mix of digital marketing channels - both online and off - will only grow broader and deeper with the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence in the coming years. This emphasis on automation and predictive analytics will dramatically enhance the positive impact marketing can deliver for customers. And by rooting these advanced tools in human behavior and learnings, Yamamoto knows we can exponentially improve that impact.
I am an advocate for women in technology. Through my founding roles at nonprofits TechGirlz and Women in Technology Summit, I work to inspire girls and economically empower women using technology. To date, TechGirlz has reached more than 10,000 girls across the country and i...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/traceywelsonrossman/2018/06/25/wrangling-data-in-service-to-digital-marketing/#41ab1a184c9a