Anne Stagg admits that the biggest adjustment she’s made in becoming CEO of Merkle is fighting the urge to roll up her sleeves and dive into every challenge the agency’s clients face. There’s certainly been a lot of temptation to resist in her first 12 months in the role. 
“We had retail clients that had to achieve in two weeks what they’d envisaged doing over two years,” recalls Stagg. “They needed partners that could support them. It’s enabled us to carve out really strong, strategic relationships with our clients. However, the real journey starts when we activate that initial digital transformation to really transform the customer experience.”
Committing to long-term change
For Stagg, digital transformation doesn’t just refer to one process or one period of time. She distinguishes between the immediate fixes necessitated by lockdowns and temporary disruption – and the long-term transformation that marketing leaders should be focusing their organisations on.
“Finding the right balance between short-term and longer-term is really important for marketing teams and the wider business – and it’s complicated by the fact that an agency like ours is often involved with an organisation for longer than the tenure of the CMO,” she says. “It’s no good just fixing the stuff that’s going to improve the customer experience today. You can’t allow that to get in the way of the longer-term transformation that’s needed.”
Taking the lead on that long-term journey will require marketers to think beyond their traditional role – and embrace new measures of success.
“If you’re transforming your business and your customer experience, then you need to change the way you work,” Stagg argues. “As custodian of the customer, marketing needs to plan activity to meet increasingly complex needs and expectations. Marketing can’t do that if it’s not best friends with the chief technology officer (CTO), but it also requires a closer collaboration with sales, customer service, merchandising and product. Clients that are progressing rapidly through digital transformation are evolving their organisational structure and creating agile teams from across functions to tackle particular commercial outcomes.”
Marketing metrics that look forward, not back
It’s that clear sense of the end-goal that Stagg believes is essential for building an agile business that can keep pace with technological change. It’s also driving a different approach to metrics among progressive-minded marketing teams. She argues that when consumer expectations are moving quickly, it’s important for data to look forwards rather than backwards.
“Dashboards and visibility of what’s happened is one thing, but it’s retrospective,” she says. “The brands that are really winning are embracing predictive analytics and AI to anticipate consumer needs to deliver a personalised experience. You can only really do that if you're focused on the customer and growth, as opposed to campaign silos or channels. It requires a change in the whole approach to planning.”
Marketing’s emerging transformation mission requires other forms of change as well. Stagg believes that progress on diversity and inclusion is essential not just for winning new business and working with clients – but also for enabling the type of cross-functional collaboration that transformation depends on.
“It’s absolutely critical that we build a workforce that’s representative of our wider community and our wider world,” she says. “Our clients expect it and it’s something we’re asked about in most request for proposals (RFPs). The bit I'm really excited about is the way diversity, equity and inclusion brings communities of people together from across our business, who wouldn't normally work together.”
A sense of inclusion is particularly vital when your agency is pushing digital transformation forward at a punishing pace. It supports wellbeing as well as diversity – and it provides the sense of purpose that employees increasingly seek. “When people go to work and look for jobs, they’re choosing their mission,” says Stagg.
For Merkle, and for marketing, that mission involves redefining the relationships that customers have with the brands in their lives. The foundations have been laid over the last tumultuous two years. Now the real journey begins.
For more insights from visionary Marketing Leaders check out LinkedIn’s CMO Corner.
