CMO.com’s Giselle Abramovich interviewed four industry experts including Brian Solis to explore the megatrends marketers should be paying attention to over the next five years.

Following is an excerpt of the interview between Brian and Giselle…

Brian Solis, principal analyst at Altimeter Group, told CMO.com:

The first megatrend I see is the unionization of the marketing and IT function into a new division aimed at improving the customer and employee experiences. This will expedite the process of aligning tech investments around specific purposes a lot faster and adapting over time.

Another big megatrend is the idea of the digital customer experience. There is going to be a rise in social science and its effect on marketing in terms of touch points like content strategy, mobile strategy, and marketing strategy, by simply reverse-engineering what the digital customer experience is versus what businesses think it is. This will be called digital anthropology.

Another megatrend I see is the rise of small data vs. big data. Small data allows marketers to hone in on data as it affects a particular pilot strategy. So if you envision it, the rise of small data is happening because marketers are doing all these [programs] and going after small data for a particular instance. Marketing becomes greater than the marketing function that it is today and becomes a big part of customer experience in every moment of truth. And the people leading the future of marketing become purveyors of customer truth.

Read the thoughts from other experts here.