Marketing 2020 rests on two hundred and fifty vision interviews with chief executives, chief marketing officers and agencies, and on 10,231 marketing participants from ninety-two countries. It examines the role of marketing, its structure, its capability, and chief marketing officer leadership, in service of business growth.
Its diagnosis is a gap between work and structure. What marketing does has changed completely, and how it is organized has not.
Key findings
- Winning brands share three characteristics: big insights, purposeful positioning, and total experience.
- Brands with a societal purpose outperform those without on every marketing measure tested, including market share, lead generation, efficiency, net promoter score, engagement, revenue growth, return on investment, and brand health.
- Capabilities have the strongest correlation to revenue growth, brand health and marketing return on investment, with consumer understanding and insights showing the widest gap.
- Overperformers are far better at attracting and keeping millennials, at seventy percent against forty-nine, and their people are more likely to see a clear career path, at seventy-five percent against sixty-four.
- The organizational answer is a flatter shape. The old chart runs a chain of directors and managers with staff beneath each, and the new one puts the chief marketing officer at the center of the same disciplines instead of above them.
What forced the change
The trends listed are urbanization, technology, sustainability, and new economies. Alongside them sits a change in the speed and visibility of everything a company does, illustrated by chief executives apologizing and by the arrival of total transparency.
The generational shift is treated as a separate force, described as Generation Why, and it applies at both brand and corporate level.
The opportunities identified are globalization, collaborating with consumers, social marketing, purposeful marketing, and the chance to influence the business. The challenges are information overload, touch point consistency, doing more with less, organizational silos, privacy risks, and keeping current.
The three characteristics
Big insights is not about owning data. The study separates having the right data and analytics available to measure effectiveness from being able to use all of it to improve effectiveness, and overperformers lead on both.
Purposeful positioning is built in three layers, functional, emotional and societal, and it is the societal layer that carries the performance comparison. Purpose also has to be believed internally: overperformers lead on pride in the brand’s purpose at eighty-four against seventy-two, on employees being fully engaged with it at sixty-three against forty-three, and on continuously engaging customers around it at sixty against forty-seven.
Total experience is framed as a trade-off between the depth of the value proposition and the breadth of touch points, with inconsistency and breach of privacy as the failure modes. The runner example maps a customer’s whole experience, from the price of a shoe through brand image and self-identification to motivation, music, social networks, and emotional association with running.
Organizing for growth
The connecting principle is that marketing is too important to be left just to marketers. Marketing working closely with the chief executive on business strategy rose from thirty-three percent in 2006 to fifty-eight percent in 2013, and marketing approving large growth-oriented investment decisions rose from nineteen to thirty-eight percent.
That influence varies widely by sector, with agreement that marketing works closely with the chief executive differing across consumer goods, manufacturing, financial services, energy and utilities, and health care.
Focus depends on one global strategy that people actually support, and support falls with distance from the center. Agreement runs around eighty percent globally, in the low seventies regionally, and in the fifties and sixties locally.
Orchestration and integration produce new roles and new partnerships. A chief experience officer, a combined marketing and technology leader, and a closer link between the chief marketing officer and the head of human resources. Overperformers also work with more outside partners, with fifty-three percent using more than five agencies against thirty-three percent.
The internal roles are reorganized around what they do to people rather than which channel they own: think for analytics marketers, do for production and content marketers, and feel for engagement marketers.
Keeping the next generation
The millennial section separates what pulls people in from what pushes them out. The motivators are mentorship, balance, collaboration, transparency, and purpose. The demotivators are hierarchy, rigidity, the accepted path, and what the deck calls the Excel effect.
The performance gap is large in both directions. Seventy percent of overperformers say they successfully attract, develop and retain millennials against forty-nine percent of the rest, and seventy-five percent of their people see a clear career path against sixty-four percent.
Training reinforces the same divide. Forty-six percent of overperformers receive more than three days of training a year against twenty-nine percent, and sixty percent rate their training above six out of ten against forty-eight percent.
What it asks of the chief marketing officer
The reframing offered is from digital marketing to marketing in a digital age, and the closing priorities are five: lead by example in a digital world, engage the total organization, inspire and empower rather than control, ensure brand consistency throughout, and build marketing capability.
Scope and limitations
This is a summary presentation given by the consultancy that ran the study, and the deck also serves as a credentials document for that firm. The comparisons between overperformers and the rest are drawn from self-reported survey answers, and one slide is still a placeholder for a video.
Source
This page summarises Marketing 2020: Organizing for Growth, by EffectiveBrands, ANA, SpencerStuart, Forbes, metrix LAB, Adobe, 2014.