Marketing is on the ascent. It has frequently led at big consumer products companies. Now its influence is growing everywhere: at B2B companies, professional services firms, companies dominated by engineering or logistics. You can see marketing’s rise on business bestseller lists, on YouTube playlists, in the new brands that have broken away and differentiated themselves, and in the explosion of marketing start-ups (and what investors are paying for them).
Marketing is becoming a more powerful and resource-rich function of business. In today’s digital world, marketing is the function responsible for creating and sustaining a long-lasting relationship with the most important asset of any business – the customer. In an always-on world, consumer expectations are changing. As a result, the nature of marketing itself is also changing--data, digital, social, mobile, analytics, real-time agility--these have all become part of the vocabulary of numerous business articles and conversation. Thus, marketers need to shift their focus from pushing messages at people to engaging them in an ongoing conversation and relationship.
Considering this, here are the 15 things trends to look out for in the future:
1. Engagement is Crucial. An engagement is a contract of betrothal. It is the start of a personal relationship expected to grow deeper and endure over time. It requires listening, nurturing and care and feeding. It comes with expectations of intimacy and trust. The engagement that marketers seek is not so different. Marketers who are serious about engaging the customer recognize that the most valuable moments are when the customer is in touch with you: using your product, reading your content. If you can address your customers’ needs during those moments--rather than put them on hold while telling them how important their call is-- you’re going to get engagement So think about your relationships. Do you look forward to seeing that person? Do you care about them? Do they share your values? Do you speak well of them to others?”
2. The start is as important as the finish. Marketers have always been treated as the last and fastest runner in the relay, brought in for the final leg to sprint for the finish. The problem is that most races are already won or lost before the last runner gets the baton. Any marketer who has run a campaign knows that marketers can sprint. But the best marketers are five-minute-mile marathoners who combine speed and stamina. They take the customer on a journey. They need to show up at the starting line, when the people who run the business are saying, “What should we make? Who should we make it for? How do we make it in such a way that the story of our product is true?”
3. Articulate your ambitions. We all want to feel that our lives have meaning. We gravitate towards brands that help us find that meaning. It could be a personal manifesto like “Think different” or “Just do it.” It could be an allusion to our common humanity like Skype’s family portrait series, which illustrated the growth of a long-distance friendship between two girls, each missing an arm. Or it could be a global call to action like Wal-Mart’s sustainable supply chain initiative. Each of these companies built an engaged audience by finding a big, ambitious theme and building a long-running campaign around it. Each also experienced sustained growth.
4. Lean is the way forward. As recently as five years ago, most marketing departments were set up only to conduct campaigns and launches. That is changing, especially at larger companies with large numbers of customers. It is not the old mode of planning a campaign, executing it, analysing the results, learning from them and applying those lessons to next year’s campaign. Marketers are increasingly running a real-time dialogue, constantly listening and instantly connecting in relevant ways. Consumers have an expectation of immediacy. Like Visa at the World 5 Cup, they are taking advantage of events when they happen and linking them to their brand. A 24/7 mentality requires a different way of working. Marketing used to be an assembly line. Now it is more like a trading room that responds to the ebbs and flows of the market as they occur. Although marketers will always have to manage the equivalent of an iPhone launch, there will also be day-in and day-out efforts to build a relationship with customers who in return reward you with a stream of purchases.
5. Turn start-and-stop into start-and-continue. The next five years will see the growth of test-and-learn as standard operating procedure. Campaign workflows are still siloed today. Analytics comes up front, then there’s a big creative piece, the campaign is launched and more analytics at the back end. Those distinct pieces need to be joined together into a more iterative workflow that combines the creative and the analytical in a collaborative process. Marketers are the stewards of significant resources – iterating in real-time, with real-time analytics about what is working and what is not will allow them to be true drivers of productivity.
6. Make transparency a virtue. Unilever Senior Vice-president of Marketing Marc Mathieu likes to say that marketing “used to be about creating a myth and selling it and is now about finding a truth and sharing it”. It is difficult to sustain myths these days; with a few clicks of the mouse, anyone can discover almost anything and instantly circulate it to an audience of millions. Companies confident enough to share the truth are choosing to participate in a web-enabled show and tell-- and consumers appreciate it.
7. The Old and the New work together. In the minds of many, marketing and advertising are synonymous: the marketing budget exists to buy TV spots and trade show booths. It is true that marketers do far more than buy ads now. A lot more. It is also true that consumers now rely more on peer-to-peer connections and less on messages directly from the companies. Marketers are creating journeys to guide consumers and customers towards a mutually desired outcome. But at the same time, marketing does run the ad budget and those traditional expenditures have not gone away. In many industries analog media like TV may decline in the next three to five years, but won’t fall by much. In the consumer products industry, for example, TV’s share of the marketing mix in 2020 should still be north of 40%. Marketers should not think in terms of discarding traditional and embracing digital. Instead, they should think about how to get both to work together in an integrated and consistent way. If marketers do it right, window-shoppers become buyers and buyers become advocates and fans.
8. Get your own house in order. An asset is an investment that generates value in the form of return on investment (ROI). Engaged customers fit the definition of an asset, but marketers often complain that their CFOs resist the idea of engagement as an asset worth investing in. In fact, these marketers are wrong: the problem is one of data, logic and presentation. Many marketers don’t fully understand what drives engagement- -and therefore they can’t present it in a compelling way to the CFO. “If you can quantify engagement, any CFO in the world will pay attention?”. And not just pay attention, but jump in and ask, “How can I help?” Too many marketers don’t understand what makes their company preferred over others.
9. Culture is everything. Of all the factors that drive engagement, the most important may be a culture of customer centricity. Culture is often mistakenly considered to be a soft concept. It is a big concept, but it is not a soft one: it can be broken down into a very specific set of values and activities that are mirrored in incentives, salaries and promotions. Customer engagement needs to play a central role in the organisation’s culture. Otherwise the business will not be sustainable.
10. Keep up with the consumers. Enterprise technology has lagged consumer technology for over a decade. Consumer behaviour changes faster than behaviour within the organisation. In the world at large, Facebook and Twitter enable communities to spontaneously form, sync up and act. Marketers have a responsibility to modify the organisation’s outreach based on changes in the outside world. At the same time, those external shifts need to be brought into the corporation. Marketing bridges the gap between the lives of consumers and those of people in the organisation.
11. Concerns over privacy are overwrought. The customers of Target, EBay and Home Depot know all too well that privacy is important. At the same time, and more relevant to marketers, the new generation of digital natives has grown up seeing the value in sharing everything. They want to share. They want personalisation. They see the trade-off between what they are giving up and what they are getting as positive. Sharing personal information is not going away. In fact, it will become more widespread.
12. Decide or Get out of the way. Marketing no longer sits in a corner and runs campaigns; it interacts with almost every part of the business, from IT to customer service and logistics. To do their jobs effectively, marketers need to be able to join up collaborative, cross functional processes with functions that have objectives and report up through other parts of the business. That requires agreeing in advance what the decisions are and what criteria will guide the decisions. If there is a purchase, who funds it? Who decides on the vendor? What is the role of marketing versus IT, finance and other functions? Progressive marketers are starting to understand and embrace the need to set up cross-functional decision-making processes.
13. Building Trust is not a magical thing. Companies collect data with every customer interaction. Most people don’t care about disclosing information if they believe it will be used to help them. The concern is that the company will take advantage of the data to do something not in their interest – sending ads, for instance, or giving the data to “trusted partners” who may misuse it. The solution is a series of small steps of helpful actions. The customer benefits. Trust grows. And ultimately the privacy concern goes away because you have demonstrated that the data are being accumulated for the benefit of the customer.
14. Meaningful Micro conversions are the key. Imagine that you are browsing on a website. A box pops up and asks if you found what you are looking for. If you say, “no,” it opens a window and you find yourself talking to customer service. If you say “yes,” it sends you to Amazon or Yelp! and asks you to leave a positive review. In theory, the interaction is positive. You are being helpful, trying to guide the customer and enlisting their help if the experience pleases them. In fact, customers feel manipulated and turned off. Instead, remember the interaction and use that to be more relevant with the next conversation. Just because you can automate something doesn’t mean you always should.
15. Get the right people on board. There is a lot of talk about political polarisation in the halls of government. Polarisation exists in marketing too. The influence of left-brained analytical hires is growing. Many creatives feel pressured. The ideal marketing organisation requires both sets of abilities—and for these to work together in an integrated fashion. Very few individuals have left- and right-brained capabilities in the same depth and strength. A more practical answer is to create a Da Vinci in the aggregate, hiring different people with different skills who combine to create a Da Vinci. That is the ideal marketing team – not right brained or left-brained but both-brained.
Marketing processes, skills and technology will continue to evolve over the next five years. Not every marketer is ready for every change. But at the end of the day, those who want to adapt and win have the power to do so. Passion is the single element most critical to success in marketing. Passion enables executives to put themselves in the customer’s shoes and advocate for the customer inside the organisation. It is not always a comfortable role. It requires confidence and courage. But in the end, passion determines if a marketer is successful. If you have a passionate commitment to make an impact on the customer by being more and more helpful to them, you will either develop the skills yourself or you will find ways to connect to the skills wherever they reside. It may be in other functions within the organisation. It may be in third parties. If you have the passion, you will find a way.