Gaining Focus - Through Commitment
The role of marketing was once easily defined based on a discrete set of actions focused on the mass market. To effectively create relevant mass-market advertising to increase brand awareness and loyalty.
This charge was vague enough to allow marketing professionals to justify investments in "the brand" despite a lack of quantifiable results. This created a crack in the foundation of marketing that lead to today's chasm. The resulting trend was the outsourcing of marketing strategy to agencies due to the increased blurring definition and role of marketing.
This approach is antiquated and no longer works in today's data-driven, personalized, customer and client-centric environment. The tsunami of content overwhelms marketing teams and confuses customers and clients. The mass market has been dissected, or what I refer to as hyper-segmentation, into discrete customer segments that require targeted and relevant messaging.
Customers and clients expect to be served through multiple channels, with a consistent experience across each.
The transition is proving difficult for marketing teams. Many organizations remain in operational silos, which limit their ability to share data and insights and create a consistent multi-channel customer experience. And cultural perceptions of marketing's role, continue to inhibit its strategic ambitions.
Focus & Commitment - To address this challenge, leadership teams need to increase their commitment to investing in the skills, tools, and processes required to become more customer and client-centric and insight-driven. Only then will marketing be aligned with the rest of the business and in a better position to serve as the catalyst of business growth.
Question - Are you contributing to the blur or are your helping focus your efforts and the organization?
