Marketing2020 set out to align marketing strategy, structure, and capability for business growth. The problem it starts from is a mismatch. What marketing does has changed beyond recognition in the evolving digital world, and how the function is organized has not changed much.
The evidence base is unusually large for the question. The study drew on the insights and experience of more than 250 CMO and peer interviews across a broad range of marketing organizations. It added a quantitative survey with over 10,000 participants from 92 countries.
Key findings
- Three characteristics define winning future brands. They are identifying relevant Big Insights, establishing a clear and engaging Purposeful Positioning, and creating brand value through a personalized, consistent, and engaging Total Experience.
- Five effectiveness drivers are critical to a future-proof marketing organization. They are connecting with other functions, inspiring all employees with the brand purpose, focusing effort on key strategies and KPIs, organizing efficient processes, and building marketing excellence.
- Brand purpose is reported as a growth lever, not a values statement. Brands with a clear purpose can drive higher business growth, margin, and price than those without. Marketers on purposeful brands also report better brand consistency as touch points increase and go digital.
- Capability investment correlates with revenue growth. The capabilities with the highest growth correlation are consumer understanding, brand positioning, and brand strategy.
How over-performers were identified
The classification is comparative, not absolute. Respondents’ organizations were divided into over-performers and under-performers by their revenue growth relative to competitors over the previous three years.
The method was not self-certified. Classification was done with an NYU Capstone analysis team and validated against publicly available revenue growth data.
Big Insights, not big data
The study’s position on data is a distinction. It is not about big data, it is about big insights. Over-performers have the edge in extracting the second from the first.
The advantage is institutional. Over-performers hold a clear point of view on how big data will affect the marketing organization, and they are putting the skills, systems, and processes in place to extract insight from it.
A CMO quoted at a Marketing2020 roundtable put the gap between talk and practice bluntly. Big data is a lot like sex in high school. Everybody talks about it and nobody does it.
Total Experience
The third brand characteristic is about relationship rather than reach. Depth and breadth of the consumer experience drives brand value. Winning brands deliver a personalized and social experience across many touch points in consumers’ daily lives.
Unilever’s Keith Weed described where that leads. Brands become increasingly important in a cluttered media world. They evolve into channels in their own right, a destination for content that attracts people to more than the products.
Connect, inspire, focus
The first organizational driver is business credibility. Successful marketing leaders use business acumen as their ticket to influence. They link their KPIs to business growth and translate marketing terms into the language of the business.
The second driver treats employees as an audience equal to customers. Over-performing organizations give the same priority to internal employee engagement as to external customer engagement. Full engagement with the brand purpose lets decisions be delegated and keeps the customer experience seamless.
Petco CMO Elisabeth Charles located the point of failure in the store. Who gets hired, how people are trained, and what they are told to say is where the rubber hits the road. Great marketing falls apart if the store is dirty or products are out of stock.
The third driver is strategy that survives contact with execution. Over-performing organizations first co-create the strategy and then embed it to maximize real-life impact. They also identify and track the KPIs for marketing’s impact, business growth, and personal performance.
Organize and build
Shared purpose is what makes structural flexibility possible. It permits organizational flexibility and helps collaboration inside marketing and with other functions such as IT, HR, and finance.
Over-performing organizations are already more networked. They build consumer-centric communities with roles that go beyond a traditional central, global, and local split. Three distinct typologies of marketers emerge from that structure.
The typologies are named for what the work demands. Think covers strong analytical capabilities. Feel covers engagement with consumer communities. Do covers content development and production.
The training gap is both size and fit. Over-performing marketing organizations have a clear quantity and quality advantage. Their employees receive 20% more training days on average, and each is more tailored to the company’s own challenges and way of marketing.
What kept CMOs awake
The interviews asked what energizes marketing leaders about the job of tomorrow and what keeps them awake at night. The striking result is where the worries came from. They are mostly internal organizational challenges.
IBM’s Jon Iwata described the response as a change in the partnership with human resources. It would mean far more collaboration than messaging to employees. Marketing and HR would be partners guiding the cultures of their companies.
Scope and limitations
This document is a brochure, not the study report. It presents key findings alongside an offer of in-house presentations, workshops, and a company-specific benchmarking tool.
It is also promotional material for a paid service. It invites readers to a Marketing2020 PulseCheck of internal vision interviews and a company-tailored online survey, sold by the consultancy that led the study.
The percentage-point gaps shown between over-performers and under-performers are survey responses, not outcomes. They record what leaders reported about their own organizations. The brochure states no confidence intervals and no test of causal direction.
It is a period document. It carries a 2013 copyright and looks toward 2020, at a time when global marketing leaders were asking how to ready their organizations for growth in a rapidly changing environment.
Source
This page summarises Marketing2020 Brochure, by EffectiveBrands, Millward Brown Vermeer, 2013.