The ever fluctuating economic conditions have changed the DNA for the Chief Marketing Officers (CMO). Brand equity can be significantly and quickly influenced by bloggers, viral marketers, facebook, youtube and the various other social networking technologies. The savvy CEO’s who realizes these changing conditions, are taking notice of the CMO office. In fact, over 50% of CMOs are hired to fix broken marketing organizations that are unable to properly function. Driven by CEO empowerment, CMOs are hired and viewed a much needed change agent, catalyst, and business builders for today’s enterprise. Since increasing importance in placed on the office of the CMO to grow the company, the strategies have to be measurable and most likely tied to the overall company objectives. Most CMO’s of today are metric fanatics, they have to be, it’s critical for “C” suite survival.
The current economic conditions have increased marketing pressure to prove campaign success with demonstrated line item ROI. The invitation into the boardroom today seldom discusses the logo or pantones of “yester” year. Today “C” level conversations involve strategic discussions on growing the customer base, campaign metrics with proven ROI, and increasing loyalty in this shrinking global market. With purse strings tightening, customers today have their pick of products and marketers are fighting for their dollar.
“What keeps me up at night … trying to grow on a shoestring budget, when I don’t have any shoes” quipped a marketing friend of mine.
Trends and Direction
A good resource which monitors the marketing heartbeat is the CMO Council (CMOC). Currently, the CMOC has about 3,500 senior members in 57 countries, which keeps their marketing eye on the key issues and trends. In fact, CMOC has been conducting extensive research on the Chief Marketing Suite for years. This peer powered affinity network which has a accumulated budgets of about 100B marketing spend, share their views with the CMOC.
One of CMOC recent reports, “The Power of Personalization” indicated that improving customer retention and loyalty is primary driver of marketing programs. In fact the report indicated that about 40% reported that personalized communications produce better ROI, but about 9% of the respondents say they have accurate and reliable customer data while about 50% of the respondents said they have fair to poor knowledge of their customers.
Liz Miller, VP of the CMO Council, addressed 45 of the world’s biggest Service Bureaus at a recent conference and concluded:
- Customer knowledge and insight is essential to CMO success and influence
- Greater intimacy and engagement leads to advocacy and loyalty
- Personalization and targeted, timely messages is a key strategy to reach the customer
One Service Bureaus asked, “How better can the print industry align with the CMO?”, she stated,
“CMOs will need informed strategic partners who will provide services and solutions to drive customer intimacy, increase loyalty, affinity and retention and drive bottom line growth. Print Providers are in a key position now to move from a vendor to a strategic partner, voicing their expertise in personalized communications, metrics, and integration of print in the multichannel to assist the CMO to succeed.”
Just wanted to add my 2 cents.
cent one:
In this environment ROI can be a very fuzzy metric. It’s compounded by the inability of the C level to trust that building a community of customers is worth doing. So what’s the metric? Number of hits? Number of members of a community? Number of spontaneous blog posts or answers to a blog? Number of searches?
Since I’m not in the marketing game, I wonder what exactly are the metrics being used. Could they still be product sell through? Or responses to a direct mail, even transpromo, campaign?
cent two:
I think it would be useful to worry less about big solutions. Concentrate on the easiest to implement solutions that bring some measurable improvement in some very, very easy to measure aspect of building community. Easy to implement means not only less money. But frankly, for the big players money is not the problem.
The problem is time and focus. Solutions that can be implemented with the absolute minimum of time and risk that show some promise have the possibility to scale. The time to market of the BIG solution, either a long sales cycle or a long implementation cycle, are probably not going to break through the corporate noise. By the time they do make it, the situation has changed. And everyone is running after the next BIG thing. And the cycle repeats.