The future of marketing depends upon two critical functions, according to Broadridge Financial Solutions’ Global CMO Dipti Kachru.

“You’ve got to obsess over your data strategy and your tech stack to be able to optimize and automate,” she told Chief Marketer this week. “That foundation is what’s going to help you deliver value, help you measure and prove that value add, and help you know what’s working and what’s not working.”

In addition to that, it’s important for companies—particularly those with brand marketing stories that are less obvious—to harness the power of storytelling. “We’re spending a lot of time with the team on how to break through the complexity of our business and make it more intuitive to people—because we have a significant role in driving the markets, but most people don’t realize that,” Kachru said. “We’ve got to work a little bit harder to be able to define how and why we are relevant, not just to the people buying our products, but to the industry at large.”

The former J.P. Morgan Chase CMO discusses her strategy for growth since joining the company seven months ago, the marketing tactics and investments CMOs should be prioritizing amid economic headwinds, how the democratization of investing is influencing the firm’s insights and solutions, and more.

Chief Marketer: Who do you count as your customers, and where are you looking to expand?

Dipti Kachru, Global CMO of Broadridge Financial Solutions: We’re a global fintech that provides technology infrastructure and communication solutions, so we primarily sell our solutions to asset managers, wealth managers, capital markets, firms, hedge funds. We’re talking to technologists, to operations and to the front office, because of our range of products, [which are] technology solutions as well as data and insights to help make better decisions around business strategy distribution. We’re also doing a lot of innovation on the client communication side and now talking to CXOs, chief digital officers and marketing leaders to think about how essential, critical communications, or even regulatory communications, can be leveraged as touchpoints to add value with our customers. We’re also doing a lot of work in healthcare now from a communications perspective.

CM: How are you are approaching brand marketing? What are the challenges there?

DK: A lot of people know us from being a premier player in the corporate governance space. We’re reframing the brand to be relevant to some of the newer audiences we’ve been talking about. It’s not this big brand effort that you expect to see in B2C, but rather a very surgical effort to continue to refine how we talk about ourselves, how we tell the stories around what we do and how we do it.

CM: Can you provide an example of that fine-tuning?

DK: Our wealth management business has multiple facets, where front-to-back platform providers help broker dealers and financial advisors operate in their roles. In the broker dealer ecosystem, what an advisor needs on their dashboard to help serve clients and how that connects through the processing and the back end is something we’re a market leader in. We’re being very specific in how we showcase what we do to that audience. It’s not just, “these are the set of products we offer.” It’s to help visualize what benefit that brings to market and to see it from the point of view of the user. In this case, our products are helping the financial advisor engage in more personalized ways with their client and use data to make better decisions to how they’re spending their time. The visualization of that is part of our journey of storytelling.

The other place where we’re starting to make a lot of inroads is in our insights business and how we’re using thought leadership specifically to bring through the intellectual capital that resides within the firm, given our unique vantage point within the industry and the amount of data we see through the clients we interact with. How we package those insights to then reach out to the audience is another way we’ve continued to harness the power of the firm.

CM: How does that thought leadership come through?

DK: It’s multichannel. You clearly find it on our website. We’re partnering with our PR firms to make sure that we develop the intellectual capital and it is being distributed in the right way. Social is a big strategy for us, which is something we’re building more muscle around, to distribute our content both from an organic as well as a paid perspective. The last thing is, we’re really building out our martech stack and our data capabilities to be able to understand both interest and intent from our customers to deliver more personalized communications to them, whether it’s relevant insights, news about what we’re doing or case studies we can share.

CM: How does sustainability factor into your messaging and the products that you offer?

DK: It’s a large part of it, as we play a significant role in the investor empowerment process. With the democratization of investing, more and more investors are coming into the market and want to know what they’re investing in. They’re very actively engaged around ESG topics. So, we are creating both solutions as well as insights for our clients. Whether it’s issuers or asset managers, we’re designing new products to understand what some of those critical data points are, what investors care about and how you deliver on those.

CM: What are the marketing tactics and investments CMOs should be prioritizing amid economic headwinds?

DK: I’ve been in the marketing business for 20 years, and there’s always ups and downs. Here’s the three things I think CMOs need to focus on. One is to have the ability to optimize and really understand marketing performance. It gives you the capability of being surgical when you need to pull back, and you need to know what’s working, what’s not working and be very aware about the strategic priorities of the moment. You’re not making sweeping changes; you’re being very specific.

The second is being agile as a marketing organization—being very planful in how we go to market, but building in the agility to be able to pivot and turn when you need to so you can capture both the moment as well as the opportunity, whether it’s to lean in or pull back.

The last thing I’d say—and we tend to do less of this, especially in headwinds—is to lean in to places where we can better deliver on the customer sentiment at the moment. So, by keeping your ear to the ground, very close to the consumer, whether it’s through individual interviews with clients, which we often do with pulse surveys, or just spending more time with the sales force. You start to understand how your clients or your customers are feeling and the role the brand can play that’s associated with their values, and being more empathetic versus being tone deaf. Also, when other brands and your competitors are pulling back, it creates white space for you to go in and establish or reestablish a connection with your most critical audiences.

CM: How are data and analytics reshaping the customer experience? And what role does privacy play?

DK: Data is critical to driving an improved customer experience. What we do with our clients, especially on the communications side, is about helping them harness the power of data to make the communications more relevant and engaging. Going the direction of more privacy-oriented rules is not in conflict with that. I think it actually gives organizations an opportunity to engage with the customer in a more authentic fashion. It creates greater trust when it’s the customer that’s giving you access to information. It reinforces that data belongs to the end user versus the organization. And by acknowledging that, it opens a channel of communication with the customer where, by earning their trust, you are on the hook for delivering value. And that drives more connectivity, and if you can deliver on it, certainly more loyalty. It’s a great opportunity for firms to continue to use data to better serve clients in more personalized ways.

CM: From your perspective, how has the pandemic has reshaped the B2B2C customer journey?

DK: The pandemic has been horrific for a lot of people. But as a marketer, one of the silver linings I’ve seen is the acceleration in digitization and digital adoption. In my current role, I see that happen everyday; we send about seven billion touchpoints of communication in a year. We’re seeing that migration from print to digital. It’s something we’re actively helping our clients through. Our data also reinforces that people are willing to go digital as long as it’s not just a replication of the print experience. You need to be able to rewire that experience to make it more engaging and add more value. There’s an acceleration in organizations investing in the transformation of their stacks, their data architecture, to be able to deliver that quality of engagement.

CM: You were recently CMO of J.P. Morgan’s Wealth Management division. What have you taken from that experience that you’re applying to your current role?

DK: I’m a big believer that marketing is a driver of growth for the firm. If you think about traditional B2B, that hasn’t always been the central driving reason that people fund a marketing organization. But my experience at J.P. Morgan only reinforced and strengthened that. I had a great privilege of leading marketing teams in the wealth space, the asset management space and in the consumer banking space, where we could take a lot of B2C principles on how you use data and automation to deliver value to the customer through the sales cycle and apply that to B2B.

A lot of what I spend time on with the team now is how are we building our data strategy and our technology to be able to facilitate the right outcomes in partnership with our sales teams. A large part of my focus is building that deeper bridge with the sales organization, not just philosophically aligned and in the trenches together and understanding what customers need, but importantly, does our technology work together? Are we able to power them with critical signals and beacons that help them be more effective at their jobs? And can we capture critical signals that they’re capturing as part of the sales process to make our marketing better?

The second one is the brand storytelling side. As a B2B brand, and a very complex one that serves many different clients with many different solutions, how are we strengthening our storytelling and going beyond just the words of what we do to better showcase what we do, whether it’s in video, whether it’s in the demonstration of our capabilities, whether it’s product demos. The third is bringing a sharper lens on the activation of digital strategies across the firm and how we go to market. There’s a strong foundation with incredible work that’s been done, but as we’ve grown and gotten more complex, we’re on a journey of marketing maturity as well.

CM: What are your goals for the company in terms of growth?

DK: We’ve got some work to do in building out our measurement infrastructure to be a little bit more predictive in the value we add. We look at performance as a marketing organization across three different areas. There’s work we’re doing on the brand side to drive perception of various critical segments that we are newer in. Are we engaging with certain customers more? Are they engaging with us through our content and our intellectual capital? Are we showing up with the right share of voice compared to our competitive sets?

The second one is enabling demand generation. We’ve got a demand generation ecosystem and we’re trying to light that up even more by understanding the connectivity of where the demand is being driven and how the demand is being converted so we can start to optimize. The third one is defining the scorecard around the sales nurture process. Marketing can help make the sales cycle more efficient by delivering relevant communications to complement the sales organization.

CM: Lastly, what are the trends that financial marketers should be following right now?

DK: It’s an evergreen trend you’ve got to obsess over: Will your data strategy and your tech stack be able to optimize and automate? Those are the two critical functions and the way I think about the future of marketing. That foundation is what’s going to be able to help you deliver value, help you measure and prove that value add, and help you know what’s working and what’s not working.

Second, while I’m obsessing over our segmentation strategy, targeting and tech stack to be able to get smarter and more effective, I also love the storytelling side of it. We’re spending a lot of time with the team on how to break through the complexity of our business and make it more intuitive to people—because we have a significant role in driving the markets, but most people don’t realize that. We’ve got to work a little bit harder to be able to define how and why we are relevant, not just to the people buying our products, but to the industry at large.

The post Marketers on Fire: Broadridge Financial Solutions’ Global CMO Dipti Kachru appeared first on Chief Marketer.

What are the greatest challenges to your business from a marketing perspective, and what solutions are you implementing to meet them? CM asked four CMOs, leading marketing departments at a tech company, a wellness brand, a sports league and a media hub, to share their thoughts this week on the above. We learned that differentiation from competitors, leading with empathy and collaboration, and crafting immersive content to keep pace with younger audiences’ appetites are among the solutions making headway for their brands. Following is what CMOs from Qualcomm, Boardroom, Cheribundi and the Drone Racing League had to say. 

Qualcomm CMO, Don McGuire:

Our innovation cycle is very quick—almost every six months across many product and technology categories. Things are moving so fast and so it’s really challenging to keep up with the concentric circles of influence on our brand. So, we have to be nimble and flexible because the feedback loop isn’t linear anymore. There’s also so much divisiveness and so much polarization that threading the needle has become very difficult.

A big challenge right now for brands and marketers is how to lead through an era of psychology, attitudes and behaviors. If you lean too far one way, you alienate a part of your potential audience, and if you lean too much the other way you alienate another percentage of your potential audience. If you stay too neutral, you alienate everybody. Right now, we’re living in a time where we need to lead—and lead with empathy. We need to bring people together. Brands that lead with empathy, drive collaboration, cohesion and goodness will win with customers and consumers. I really feel like you can you can dive into a conversation from a pragmatic, logic-based and empathetic way by creating dialog around a core issue to the problem everyone can agree on without getting extreme on in either side.

Right now, we’re driving marketing initiatives and brand awareness for two brands, one more on the B2B side and the other on the B2C side—Qualcomm and Snapdragon. Qualcomm is our company name and we have a long and rich history working within the technology sector. Snapdragon really has a life and personality of its own and has much higher end-consumer awareness globally.

About a year ago, we decided to separate the marketing initiatives around these two brands to better communicate the core aspects to targeted audiences, while still intertwining the brands where it appropriate. Through this initiative we have seen significant traction. Our campaign to educate technology enthusiasts about Snapdragon’s premium technology capabilities, Snapdragon Insiders, has grown from 0 to 5.9 million in a year, while we are seeing more awareness about Qualcomm’s full offerings among a more targeted B2B crowd.

For more from McGuire, here’s a conversation from when he first landed the role of CMO.

Drone Racing League CMO, Anne Marie Gianutsos:

Gen Z wants competition so fast it happens in an instant. The days of sitting through hours-long, slow-paced games are mostly gone. That’s why drone racing is so well-positioned as a global mainstream sport—it’s thrilling action in the blink of an eye. In the Drone Racing League, the world’s best pilots race high-speed drones through spectacular courses during minute-long heats. We stream immersive videos captured from a camera on the drone, so fans tuning in genuinely feel like they’re flying. We cut this content for quick mashups on social, which is especially loved by our nearly five million TikTok fans.

For more from Gianutsos, enjoy this Marketers on Fire piece with the chief marketer.

Cheribundi CMO, Rob Willey:

The greatest challenge and most important responsibility of marketing is to inform innovation and creatively bring products to market that consumers want. It is our job to be the voice of the consumer and the reflection of culture to create real differentiation. In categories like wellness, there is so much marketing noise that we address those challenges by partnering with creators who used (and loved) our products far before we paid them to do so. Not only do they showcase the true benefits of tart cherry juice, they inform our innovation to make the next big thing in sports nutrition.

Boardroom and 35V CMO, Sarah Flynn:

The greatest challenge in the media industry as a whole is that for legacy brands, there’s not a lot of growth and innovation opportunity; for more niche or newer media platforms, the challenge is breaking through the noise and gaining, first, eyeballs, and secondly, a dedicated audience.

Boardroom lives in a niche between sports, business and entertainment media, which is an incredible spot to occupy but necessitates that we always understand where our point of view and our voice differentiates from other outlets’ coverage. As a newer media brand, keeping that voice and continuing to cultivate our dedicated audience is what is going to help us grow and cut through the aforementioned noise.

For more from Sarah Flynn, check out our Brands on Fire piece.

The post Four Chief Marketers Dish on Challenges and Opportunities Within Their Businesses appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Modernizing marketing operations within a 215-year-old global research and education company, itself comprised of 57 disparate brands accustomed to varying levels of marketing innovation, takes a level of commitment its customer base of researchers is renowned for.

Indeed, what surfaced when Wiley CMO Shari Hofer applied research, data and martech tools toward the company itself was the realization that it was not serving its customers at every stage of the buyer’s journey—which has the potential to begin during college and last until the advanced stages of their careers.

We spoke with Hofer about what Wiley’s rebrand entailed; how marketing technology tools helped support strategies for personalization; tactics used to maintain productivity across a global marketing organization during the pandemic, and more.

Chief Marketer: You’ve modernized marketing operations at Wiley since you came on board. What are some of the changes that you’ve made?

Shari Hofer, CMO of Wiley: We are a global leader in research and education, founded 215 years ago, so we have a pretty extensive legacy. Right now, we’re focused on driving forward the knowledge economy through scientific research, and then also using career-connected education. We work primarily with researchers, learners and employers.

When I started about five years ago, they were pretty far behind in their marketing delivery. Marketing was, at that point, an event-driven-type culture. We shifted the organization into a customer-centric organization. We’ve got about 57 brands that we’ve carried through that 215-year legacy.

We were on a mission to figure out how we could modernize and make those 57 brands relevant, and then do it how people receive marketing today. A big focus was getting the right people in the organization, upskilling them—because they didn’t have the type of skills that we needed to move the brand and organization forward—and then getting the marketing technology stack in-house that we needed to bring all of that to life.

CM: What strategies did you use to accomplish that?

SH: We had to take a moment and figure out the actual purpose of this brand. Why are we here? What’s our promise? What are our values in the organization? Then we were able to build what the identity looked like. We decided we were a hybrid and that Wiley was going to be the primary brand. And then we started looking at what our customers think of us overall.

From a modernization standpoint, once we had the brand and an understanding of what we needed the brand to do, we started to build a shared service demand center of excellence—because we knew we needed a way to activate it. That’s when we brought in the technology stack and formed an internal agency so that all of those elements of the brand could be delivered consistently to customers. We purchased the Adobe stack, for example, to transform this approach and make it more personalized.

CM: What’s an example of this new personalization strategy?

SH: Email was a big channel for us—in the late 2000s. It still is, but we weren’t getting to all the people in the ways that we wanted to. So, we experimented last year with TikTok, for example, which came to life through research when we figured out where people were. Videos were the highest-consumed piece of marketing from the audience we were trying to get to. And we did some experiments—believe it or not—on Pinterest. The results were eye-opening and tremendous. That led us to believe that we were not addressing the audience in a personalized way. So, we shifted a lot of our spend over to those two channels, and we’re still experimenting on them.

CM: What worked for you on TikTok? Where did you find your inspiration? 

SH: Our primary audience is individuals looking for education resources. They want to either advance in their careers or their personal lives. We created very short videos about how to find education resources and what Wiley had to offer. Step one was getting people to our website to see what was there. That’s not a way that we would go to market previously. As a traditional company, we would’ve given you a lot of information to digest. We would’ve led you to a lot of text to read. Instead, we did these quick little videos and got a huge amount of click-throughs.

CM: You manage a global team comprised of 600 marketers. What’s your approach to organizational culture and making it cohesive?

SH: We’ve had to change a lot over the last two years because we’re all at home. From a productivity standpoint, we put together a number of community-based programs, things like candid conversations. We held monthly firesides with my direct team of 130 marketers where we sat down and focused in on one team in marketing, what they did and why they did it, which then inspired people to cross-pollinate and talk and share ideas. It developed the culture that we wanted, along with upskilling digital marketing skills, to make people proud of what they do and continue to advance. And then we had a number of smaller programs that helped with mentorship, recognizing accomplishments and things like that.

CM: How did your marketing shift during the pandemic?

SH: Suddenly all of these researchers were at home and having more time to finish—maybe research that they hadn’t finished for years. We are competing with others to try and get that research. That’s where we flipped to looking at how we are actually engaging with them. We had a lot of always-on campaigns that were just churning out messages to individuals. But then we dug in deeper to try to figure out people’s motivations, where they were connecting and get involved in those channels and show up as a partner.

CM: With email now a less important channel, where are you reaching your customers now?

SH: It depends a little bit. We took a step back and looked at the personas, and then we dug into the motivations of the customers, which helped us figure out which channels that they were engaging with and interacting with more. On the personalization side with Adobe, it shed some light into where we get the best response. Email is still a big channel, don’t get me wrong. But it isn’t the only channel that we use, and we are doing more integrated campaigns and then focusing in on where we’re seeing better responses.

CM: How are you balancing consumer data privacy laws with personalizing experiences?

SH: As a global corporation, we do have to follow all of those data privacy laws. We have different ways of going to market in certain countries, depending on what the rules of engagement are in those particular areas. And we are pretty strict about that. When we put in double opt-in in some areas, we did see a decrease, which is why our focus on emails shifted. We needed to find other ways to do it where we were still compliant, but didn’t see that loss.

CM: You mentioned revamping your marketing tech stack. How are you leveraging the data that you’re collecting through new technologies?

SH: About 82 percent of our revenue comes from digital—people buying digital content from us. From the marketing and the data side, we engage with customers sometimes at the earliest moment of joining an education experience. Or maybe you are starting your higher education experience and an instructor tells you to buy courseware and it comes from Wiley. You may start with Wiley all the way through to when you’re advanced in your career and you might need to take a CPA exam again to keep your certifications for it.

We realized that we started with a customer at the beginning of their experience and we could work with them all the way through the end. And that new technology and data stack helped us understand when you were coming back and buying something from us, what stage you were in in your career. Were we doing the right things and delivering what you needed? This is now opening it up, bringing that product data, your purchase history and all of those data elements together. It’s helped us get a better picture of what we can do to serve our customers better.

CM: So before, you weren’t considering this lifetime customer.

SH: Well we considered it more by the brand. And then as we did the brand work, we said, well, wait a minute. This customer could be with us through the entire duration of their career or their education journey. And we’re not really serving them well. We thought about how we actually deliver the best for customers and make them aware that they can get everything they need from us.

CM: In the research and education fields, what are your biggest challenges from a marketing perspective?

SH: On the research side, we are moving to a direct-to-consumer model. But it’s not a model where we’re selling something directly, because your research goes in cycles. It might take you two years to write a research paper that you’re ready to submit. We looked at when you came to us last and submitted, and then we would check in with you over time, nurturing, constantly talking to you and making you aware of us for when you were ready.

Education is a little different, and we have to support the two models. If you’re in a course and an instructor tells you to buy something, you just need to know where to go to buy it because you need it for that course. We were really talking to the instructors, making sure they knew what we had to offer so they could offer it to their students. That’s why we brought all the marketers together to talk during these fireside chats, because the types of marketing they do are vastly different.

CM: And the types of marketing varies because the brands are so different?

SH: Very much so. Some of the research brands are very old. They’ve been around forever. They’re established brands that people have a lot of understanding of. And then on the education side, we have a lot of new, young or innovative brands that we’re starting up. So, it’s figuring out how to bring those two together so people don’t just see us in one way, but see us across the continuum of the journey.

The post CMO Corner: A Chat with Shari Hofer, Chief Marketing Officer of Wiley appeared first on Chief Marketer.

What does it take to reign supreme as a modern CMO in today’s multifaceted business world? What should marketers aspiring to reach the C-Suite focus on in terms of career advancement and developing specific skills? We posed these questions to three CMOs, and their advice centered around a trio of themes that marketers ought to prioritize: customer-centricity; developing business acumen specific to your brand; and embracing agility. Here are insights from chief marketing officers Amy Summy of Labcorp, John Sheldon of SmileDirectClub and Lisa Stockmon of Banfield Pet Hospital.

Amy Summy, CMO of Labcorp:

I’m passionate about really taking the time to understand the business language. Your business leaders don’t really speak in marketing lingo. Think about how you connect what marketing does to how the business operates, and how they think about growth, revenue and acquisition. Marketers have different skills. Some are super creative, some are very analytical—there’s so many different types. Be passionate about whatever you are.

Personally, I always naturally go to the customer. One of my first questions here was, who are our customers? Not the companies that we sell to, but the people. What makes them tick, and how do you get to them? However, I don’t feel like there’s a specific playbook. If you’re at Pepsi, you might be a different type of marketer versus here at Labcorp. It’s figuring out what your company needs and then leaning into that.

For more from Summy, read the full profile here.

John Sheldon, CMO of SmileDirectClub:

To me, it really comes down to three pieces. Number one is you’ve got to listen to your customer, in every possible way. Some of the ways that I do that at SmileDirectClub is I watch, on a weekly basis, videos of visits to our SmileShop to see what that experience really looks like—obviously with the consumer’s permission. Another thing we do: I sit on two hours of phone calls, just listening to customer care calls. And then lastly, our social media listening team is feeding me reports and insights throughout. You need to be able to listen to your customer, take that and then go do something about what you learn.

The second is deep analytical skills. Marketing has become more analytical over the last 20 years, since the dawn of ecommerce. So, making sure that you’re sharp on your analytical skills, knowing what statistical significance means and making sure your team is doing proper test design—all of those elements are crucial. And then lastly, stay creative—amidst all of what I just said, which is much more about observing and analytics. The ability to break through is about doing something interesting and creative. Empowering your creative team to do breakthrough work, to do something distinctive and interesting that’s going to get people’s attention, still matters a lot in marketing. It’s all those things together that can make for a successful upgrade into the CMO seat.

For more from Sheldon, read the full profile here.

Lisa Stockmon, CMO of Banfield Pet Hospital:

You have to be open minded. You have to be approachable, and you have to always remain strategic. One of the things I tell my team is that you have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable—and how do you welcome that? How do you begin to approach it with wonderment? There’s been so much change in the last 20 years. It’s about staying on top of the change that’s going to come about in the next 20 years.

For more from Banfield, read the full profile here.

The post The Road to the C-Suite: Top Qualities That Marketers Should Master appeared first on Chief Marketer.

The marketing universe grows exceedingly complex by the moment, it seems, whether it’s shifting attribution and measurement models, up-and-coming platforms snagging share of audience, new technologies enhancing the customer journey, or any number of fast-evolving, hot-button issues on the minds of marketers today. It’s safe to say that for those with c-suite aspirations, it can be difficult deciding where to apply focus. To help narrow that purview, we spoke with four CMOs—culled from our Marketers and Brands on Fire series—about the most important trends to be tracking right now, from the digitization of marketing to the importance of brand purpose to identity-based measurement.

Chief Marketer: Can you talk about some trends that you feel like marketers should be focused on right now for 2022?

BlackBerry CMO Mark Wilson: The digitization of marketing has been a boon for so many marketers. And your ability to understand your market has never been better. It’s not new, because we’ve been focused on it, but it’s becoming more and more relevant every year. Our ability to understand trends based on more data coming in has only gotten better.

The other trend is something we lean into a lot: understanding your competitors. If you did a competitive study 10 years ago, you would probably hire a research firm and do it once a year to try and understand what’s happening in your market. Today, we understand what’s going on with our competitors on a weekly basis. We’re much smarter about understanding what our competitors are doing, what seems to be working for them, what doesn’t work for them. We’re much more mindful of having an outside-in perspective in B2B marketing. I see this trend only picking up.

SmileDirectClub CMO John Sheldon: The number one piece, particularly as it relates to digital marketing, is about signals. In an environment where Apple and iOS have reduced the amount of signals, finding other ways—third-party ways—of sending signals into the platforms is really important. That’s one big piece. Beyond that, it’s the same things that we’ve been about in marketing forever. Making sure you have a real purposefulness to your brand, and that you communicate that throughout all of your advertising. It allows people to connect with and learn more about the brand.

More than anything through this pandemic, our CRM engine has been the engine of stability. It’s created an incredible ability for us to take leads, which have been a little bit bumpy as we’ve been experiencing the ups and downs of this pandemic, and pulling them through on a consistent basis to get us to aligner sales. Having a really strong underlying CRM capability is powerful and important, particularly for high-consideration products.

Banfield Pet Hospital CMO Lisa Stockmon: I think the whole idea of digital transformation is over. Digital is how we communicate, and so it’s not necessarily transformation. It is how you meet that customer where he or she is. The adoption of that isn’t something that you can choose. Consumers have an immediacy now. They want to work from home. They want their food delivered while they’re at home. And understanding that immediacy of the consumer is going to lead to some success. We’ve seen that at Banfield as well, which has to adapt to how we communicate with our pet parents, how we text with them, how we provide information to them through all of our digital channels.

CM: When we spoke about the top trends in marketing right now for our executive roundup, you touched on the increased need for measurement and accountability of marketing spend. What’s your approach to identity-based measurement? Do you have any recommendations for marketers?

ZenBusiness Co-founder and CMO Ryan Pitylak: It’s definitely top of everybody’s mind. The real impact of all this is probably going to be felt the most in about a year, when Google starts to change some of its rules related to cookies. But there have already been a lot of changes led by Apple, around Safari on your mobile device, for example. There’s already a loss of data if you’re just relying on cookies. If you’re going to have any chance at competing effectively with other major brands, then you need to understand the contribution that each advertising channel is having towards driving you new customers. And that can be difficult when you’re looking at advertising that’s being delivered across so many channels, including TV.

The best measurement frameworks are not relying on cookies. There are identity companies out there. I think two of the companies that are the best in this area are Neustar and Visual IQ. Neustar has an identity-based framework, because they power a lot of Know Your Customer (KYC) for banks, phone companies… it’s incredible how much data they have. They map all the different advertising to this person at the core, and then the marketer understands the contribution that every single channel had.

Furthermore, with Facebook, almost nobody has the ability to know when a particular person has viewed an ad. Visual IQ and Neustar have gotten behind the walled garden of Facebook and many other platforms, and those platforms trust Neustar because of their strength in maintaining the integrity of people’s data and identity. As marketers, we can actually get visibility into that. The ability to make smart investment decisions and media allocation decisions, and to be able to forecast appropriately, is all made possible with this foundation.

CM: Another trend you cited was the need for companies to do good in the world.

Ryan Pitylak: We think about our decisions through that lens. The investments that we made in ZenBusiness Academy, for example, which is education, and the future investments that we’re making in both the platform and different ways of giving back and connecting with our customers, are all with that framework in mind. And they may not always have a profit motive associated with it.

There are so many great things that come from being a business that has made a decision to do that, [such as] the ability to attract employees who feel like they want to make a difference in the world. When scrutinized by discerning buyers, like millennial and Gen Z shoppers, who care about buying from companies that align with their values, then we have the opportunity to win—especially against some large corporation that doesn’t really seem to care about its customers.

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The firm polled more than 50 fractional CMO consultants serving Fortune 500 companies about business performance and challenges in 2020. Following are additional key takeaways from the Market Trends 2020 report and an inforgraphic detailing the findings, here.

• 72 percent of CMOs say greater collaboration is happening between organizational entities in order to meet company-wide growth.
• In terms of achieving that growth, understanding the customer and developing relevant strategy are the first and second most vital ways to do that.
• Approximately one third of businesses expect to bring more marketing agency work in-house in order to reduce costs.
• Looking at content focus for CMOs, the survey showed video, blogging and case studies as the top three priorities.
• Keeping up with technological advances is major challenge, with 88 percent of CMOs surveyed saying it’s difficult to keep pace.
• CMOs expect that private equity partners in particular will be more demanding of growth this year.
• 54 percent of CMOs believe retailers will see Amazon’s dominance as a negative, with just 14 percent viewing it as a positive.
• In order to thrive amidst Amazon’s dominance, a direct-to-consumer strategy for retailers is recommended by 53 percent of CMOs.
• Experiential marketing campaigns will continue to be used to encourage brand advocacy.
• Advancements in predicative analytics will particularly influence predictive modeling of consumer behavior, qualification and prioritization of leads, and customer targeting and segmentation.

Other articles you might enjoy:

• The CMO Reckoning Isn’t a Coincidence
• Getting to the C-Suite: How Six CMOs Rose to the Top
• CMO Roundtable: Visa, Personal Capital, AKT and Zoom Talk 2020 Marketing Trends

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For several months, persistent buzz has ensued about CMOs going the way of the dinosaur because of the increasing influence of data-fueled technologies. But data isn’t going to kill off the CMO. In fact, Coca-Cola just reversed its two-year-old decision to do away with its global CMO title by bringing it back and naming Manolo Arroyo for the role.

CMOs like Arroyo have more data than ever, and that data can now better measure ROI than ever before. If they understand the nature of their modern role, they can understand how an OOH ad, a streaming ad, a podcast ad or any other campaign actually affected sales.

Therefore, the right data is empowering, not threatening. The question should be more around whether you have the right data. If CMOs have the right data, their roles won’t be threatened.

After the last year—even with Coke’s U-turn—some may call my opinion counterintuitive. In 2019, McDonald’s and Johnson & Johnson ditched their CMO roles in favor of giving more power to titles like chief growth officer or chief customer officer. Due to the sheer magnitude of those historic brands, many an industry watcher said their moves were a death knell for the CMO. But CMOs can wrest that power back in 2020 if they change their mindsets about data. Data should, by now, be baked into the role of the CMO. Here are two mindsets that reveal a CMO today who is not only going to survive but thrive.

Other articles you might enjoy:

• CMO Roundtable: Visa, Personal Capital, AKT and Zoom Talk 2020 Marketing Trends
• The CMO Reckoning Isn’t a Coincidence
• Getting to the C-Suite: How Six CMOs Rose to the Top

Value data-inspired masterstrokes as much as gut-level genius
Many CMOs have climbed the ladder of success thanks to creative, right-brain talents. But that mindset is from the past, and there are now many avenues for data-driven success for CMOs—and believe it or not, many routes drive straight toward creativity for TV, mobile and social media advertising.

For instance, Burger King, led by CMO Fernando Machado, a year ago combined creativity with mobile data for geo-conquesting efforts that epically trolled rival McDonald’s. The tag line, Whopper Detour, wouldn’t have been possible without the location data powering the effort, which offered consumers a Whopper for one penny whenever they were within 600 feet of a McDonald’s. The data-driven effort garnered Burger King a Cannes Lions Grand Prix award.

While Burger King offers inspiration for mobile marketers, the out-of-home (OOH) advertising space might be the most interesting application of the equation: data + creativity = success. There’s been a resurgence, if not a renaissance, in OOH, an $8 billion industry in the U.S. that’s expected to double by 2023. IKEA, under the direction of CMO Peter Wright, understands the strength that can be wielded when combining data intelligence with OOH creativity.

The home furnishing brand’s location in the London suburb of Greenwich, England, was opened with considerable fanfare because it was the most environmentally sustainable IKEA ever. Billboard ads in Greater London directed potential shoppers to the new store, encouraging them to take the most eco-friendly transportation—walking. The signage informed passersby of the approximate number of steps it would take to visit the IKEA from their location, and that statistic was accompanied by a large arrow, pointing them in the right direction. The OOH campaign garnered considerable attention from the ad world and provided the industry with another example of data-driven creativity.

Brian Czarny is CMO of Factual

The post The CMO Role Is Evolving Rather Than Going the Way of the Dinosaur   appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Traditionally, marketers survive and thrive because at the end of the day we are the champions of the customer and stewards of the brand. But this time around, something is different. Consumers, policy groups and nonprofit players from across the ideology spectrum are calling for greater accountability and transparency for global technology companies. And that timing is not a coincidence. While top brands are making strides in driving innovation and contributing to powerful causes, the technology industry as a whole has stumbled in conveying a cohesive, authentic and purpose-driven brand narrative beyond products alone. The consequences of this are now abundantly clear.

Despite the uncertainty, best-in-class marketers are charting a course for the future of the entire industry. By embodying a creative, holistic and data-first brand identity, organizations have an opportunity to not only earn back trust in the hearts of consumers, but marketers now have the ability to demonstrate tangible ROI and justify the impact their efforts have.

Here’s an exploration of how we arrived here and how marketers can change the conversation by speaking the language of their customers:

The New Business: Purpose-Driven

The digital economy is massively interconnected. Nothing a brand does exists in a vacuum—every single touchpoint across every single channel, digital or otherwise, contributes to a single story. As a result, products, experiences and identity are now shared resources between brands and their communities. That’s why purpose emerged as such an influential factor in how people connect with brands. It’s an emotional anchor that puts all of these different elements into context. In fact, 91 percent of consumers would switch brands if a different one was purpose-driven and had similar price and quality.

But, because the digital marketplace is so far reaching and brands can engage with consumers in so many different ways, it changes the way brands need to think about their place in the global ecosystem. What do we have to say about the issues our customers care about? How can we take responsibility for our impact? The next generation of marketers are taking a leading role in not only defining a brand’s identity and purpose, but bringing that story to life in a unique, creative way that authentically resonates with consumers.

Other articles you might enjoy:

• Getting to the C-Suite: How Six CMOs Rose to the Top
• Three Ways Marketing and Technology Can Collaborate on Digital Transformation
• Seven Customer Retention Predictions for 2020

The New Customer: Engaged but Cautious

Audiences have never been more empowered and informed. The same digital economy that empowers marketers to tell new and meaningful stories has also enabled consumers and employees alike to become highly involved in brand communities. Social media networks give core stakeholders a wide platform to either advocate for, or call out, a brand. Late flights, poor food service or even a particularly exceptional interaction with a customer service rep—all of these have made their way online and are meaningfully contributing to brand reputation. However, even with heightened voices, these digital-first consumers are wary. They’ve witnessed firsthand the consequences of mismanagement, especially with data, and are more likely to believe that brands are focused on profit over people and their best interests.

When it comes to overcoming these barriers and connecting with consumers of the future, marketers hold the keys to the kingdom. By capturing their voice and translating it in to hyper-personalized, once-in-a-lifetime experiences, marketers are winning back customer respect and trust. It might be an uphill climb, but the cure for customer cynicism is empathy, thoughtfulness and the tenacity to show up for them again and again. And not just when you have something to share. When they talk, you have to listen and respond.

The New Technology: Deeply Human

In the past when CMOs were called to justify their value, a common talking point was the difficulty of measuring marketing attribution and ROI. But an important shift has occurred and is changing the way marketers cement their value within an organization—access to better data and analytics. Through technology, like never before, marketers are now able to quantify and measure abstract concepts like feelings and loyalty and tie them directly to business objectives and functions. For example, we can look beyond the number of times a piece of content has been downloaded and get to the heart of why it resonates with the readers in the first place.

Measurement is upending not only marketing, but entire organizations and even industries. Products can be completely redesigned around the emotional response customers have, experiences can be crafted down to the individual level and there is greater visibility to focus marketing investment on growth areas—the opportunities are endless. Tomorrow’s Chief Marketing Officers aren’t just the champions of the customer, they own this data and lead authentic customer-centricity.

The New CMO: Community Champions

Businesses today are fundamentally different. Even customers and employees are fundamentally different. And the technology businesses use to build a cohesive brand narrative are advancing at an ever-quickening rate. But one thing that remains steadfast is that people will always crave evocative and compelling narratives. These stories inspire deeper connections and investment in a brand. As customer expectations continue to evolve and they demand more from businesses, CMOs will lead the charge for the new chapters that lay ahead. Communities are calling for brands to be involved members of society who leverage their capabilities to build exceptional experiences—and marketers are answering that call.

Alicia Tillman is Global Chief Marketing Officer for SAP

The post The CMO Reckoning Isn’t a Coincidence  appeared first on Chief Marketer.

The role of the chief marketing officer is rapidly evolving, as numerous factors like customer experience (CX), digital technology, data and artificial intelligence influence both day-to-day and long-term marketing strategies.

In this special report, discover how CMOs can rise to the challenge of meeting customers’ increasingly higher expectations.

Learn:

• What is influencing buying decisions
• The critical role of data in CX
• Top issues facing accurate marketing attribution
• Ideas for transforming your business into a customer-driven enterprise

Sponsored by:

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