This document collects what marketing leaders themselves asked the Marketing2020 study to answer, and what they reported as their challenges, motivators and de-motivators. It is the agenda-setting input to the study rather than its output.
Key findings
- The questions are practical and organizational rather than conceptual. What priority marketing changes to make, how to adapt the organization to drive revenue growth, and how to win the support of the rest of the organization.
- Leaders also asked what not to do, and how to cover the biggest risks, which is a question about avoiding failure rather than copying success.
- They asked for concrete lessons from winners, practical examples to emulate, and a leadership roadmap to follow.
- They asked the study to be explicit about where its answers apply, distinguishing B2B from B2C and small companies from big ones.
The challenges leaders named
The most-cited challenge is internal standing: whether peers and senior management understand and recognize marketing’s value and its return on investment. It appears twice in the list, once with the ROI qualifier and once without.
A second group is about scale and volume: brand consistency across a touchpoint explosion, a sense of being overwhelmed that the document calls infobesity, doing more with less, and adapting the proposition to an explosion of segments that ultimately reaches a single customer.
A third group is about working across boundaries: silos and an unwillingness to collaborate on customer solutions, connecting with other disciplines, choosing the right mix of agencies and getting them to align, and making global and local work together.
A fourth group is about risk and reputation: privacy risks and getting the space to work with legal, overcoming risk aversion, defending brand reputation in a fully transparent world, and managing a widening set of external stakeholders.
Capability runs through the list as well: marketing skills and organizational capability for a hyper-competitive world, training and development, personal ability to stay current, moving from data to insights, and accelerating the pace of marketing.
What motivates and what does not
The motivators are largely about scope and meaning: marketing in a digital world, social media, globalization, marketing taking a more active leadership role inside the company, collaborating with consumers on solutions, personal and professional growth, transparency, developing new markets, purposeful marketing, and personalization.
The de-motivators are almost entirely internal. Lack of internal understanding of the role of marketing, lack of clear leadership and willingness to take risk, lack of internal alignment, lack of influence and resources, internal politics, and corporate bureaucracy and hierarchy.
Scope and limitations
The document is a list of inputs, not analysis. It records the questions and the ranked concerns that were to be addressed, and states no findings against them.
Source
This page summarises M2020 Key CMO Questions to be Answered, by EffectiveBrands, ANA, WFA, SpencerStuart, Forbes, MetrixLab, Adobe, 10/18/2017.