Last week I had to present my take on the current state of retail marketing. At first I thought it would be tough to come up with key trends, especially in an omni-channel context, because we’re kind of entering a transition period for omni-channel, where the industry is moving from strategy into execution, and marketing was at the forefront of omni-channel change, so it would be the most mature in making that shift, right?

Well, you can say that marketing is the furthest down the path of omni-channel transformation, only if you mean it like a construction project means “knocking down the old house is halfway to building the new one. “

How bad is it in retail marketing right now? Let’s take a look at a few key areas.

The Customer Experience

Who owns the customer experience? I wrote not too long ago that I was startled to find that this question is still open for debate within many retailers. My conclusion is that like it or not, ultimately marketing will own the customer experience, if only by virtue of it owning customer data. But there are still a lot of retailers out there debating and struggling over the organizational implications of putting “customer ” ahead of “product “, and the work has only just begun.

Consolidation

A lot of retailers, when they established their eCommerce division, had no idea that they were actually setting in motion events that would lead to a mini stand-alone company right under their roof, complete with merchandising, IT, supply chain, and yes, marketing. So a lot of marketing organizations, in addition for fighting for their seat at the executive table and ownership of the customer experience, are also dealing with an internal battle over how best to tell the brand story.

This requires a bit of elaboration. First, the idea that the retailer has a brand story to tell is a no-brainer in some verticals, and a revolutionary and controversial topic in others. Retailers that sell multiple national brands have a real identity crisis – their own brand was largely defined by the brands they sell and the prices they could sell them at. But when you can find a national brand almost anywhere, that value proposition to the customer loses a lot of credibility.

In fashion, particularly for vertically integrated manufacturers that also have retail stores, brand first, products second was long a way of life. So that part wasn’t so hard. But as digital channels opened up new touchpoints for consumers to use to interact with the brand, figuring out how to tell a single, cohesive brand story across all of those touchpoints became very challenging. Especially when the digital team lived in eCommerce, not in Marketing.

So some retail marketing teams have made plays to have their organizations consolidated – RSR saw this in our last benchmark report on the topic – only to find that consolidation has some drawbacks. Like, for example, the same exact story told the same exact way across channels turns out to be boring. If a shopper can get the whole brand experience on Facebook, why would she engage with you on Pinterest, where it’s just a repeat in a different user interface?

The ultimate organizational landscape required to support one owner of the customer experience is still in extreme flux – the house analogy is apt. Retailers know that the way things used to be won’t work for the future. But they’ve essentially knocked down the old house without a strong plan for what the new house even looks like, forget about building it.

Some retail CMO’s are starting to speculate that the future of marketing is a matrix organization, where marketers throughout the enterprise come together regularly to get the brand promise and story straight, center on core campaigns that will be executed across all channels throughout the year or planning period, and then go off to their individual areas – some to corporate marketing, some to digital marketing, some to eCommerce, some even to merchandising and stores – and use the unique strengths of their individual touchpoints to put a unique and value-added spin on the brand story that all channels will be supporting. That, at least, is a plan, even if the reality isn’t quite there yet.

Technology Hedges

The last major area of disruption within marketing centers on technology. In our 2013 marketing benchmark, RSR saw a huge spike in the percent of respondents who reported that the IT team was a barrier to achieving their marketing objectives. It wasn’t that IT suddenly got really bad at their jobs, it was because marketing, which historically could do end-runs around IT whenever they got tired of waiting, is now being told to get in line with IT just like everyone else.

This is the downside of a bigger seat at the executive table, but it’s also an opportunity. What retailers want and need most of all in support of marketing is one view of the customer. But as new marketing touchpoints come into the mix, their immaturity means they are not well supported within one view of the customer – adding new touchpoints to the mix fractures that single view over time.

To top it all off, marketers don’t have all the tools they need to best support that single view of the customer. Digital marketers have their tools – the emerging Digital Marketing Platform, or DMP. And traditional marketers have tools of their own – namely, Customer Relationship Management, or CRM. You can get the pros and cons of each in an article I wrote specifically about that topic, but the net effect is that without a clear technology path forward, retailers are either sitting on their hands and waiting for a winner, or they’re hedging their bets and investing in both CRM and DMP (sometimes without the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, because they have a different reporting structure).

This is where IT’s opportunity comes in. The reality of retail IT is that it is too slow, and the backlog is too big, and it’s no surprise that historically marketing did their best to ditch the corporate IT method of implementation because their customers weren’t going to wait around and neither could they. But the answer is not to force marketing to get back in line, it’s to invest to make IT far more agile and responsive, so that it can keep up with the pace of change that marketing demands – because ultimately, that pace of change is going to infect other parts of the business too. Remember, marketing is the most mature within omni-channel transformation. The biggest news of 2014 is that the rest of the company is not going to be able to hide from that disruptive wave.

IT could play an enormously helpful role in helping marketing navigate the CRM vs. DMP debate, and could also help create a customer data architecture that can withstand the fracturing effects of new channels and touchpoints, making it easier for retailers to maintain one view of the customer over time. But that’s only if both sides are willing to partner instead of point fingers. And, of course, it will require cash. Loads of cash spent on fixing past technology shortcuts that are now hitting retailers hard. But that’s another story for another day.

In the meantime, when you think about omni-channel maturity, just remember that when it comes to the S-curve of disruption, we’re still on that early curve – I don’t even think we’ve hit the first real inflection point.

Marketing is the closest to it, but we still have a long way to go – we’re still in the wreckage and ruins of the old ways of doing business, and a lot of the important long-term questions still haven’t been answered. That doesn’t mean that the industry can’t execute on near-term things that clearly need to be done, like develop and tell a single brand story in a unique and additive way across touchpoints. But don’t mistake that for a shiny new house, complete and ready for move-in.

It’s early days still, people. Early days.