Buckle Up - Breaking through Legacy Perceptions

Evolving Legacy Perceptions & Future Expectations of the Professional Services Marketing

The contemporary CMO and marketer can no longer be just a brand ambassador and storyteller; they must also have a deep understanding of marketing technology.  There are several market and psychological shifts occurring in professional services and I would dare to say that globally were are evolving towards a services based economy:

 

Creative Storytelling – Too many brands, specifically professional services brands continue to fail at persuasively placing what they have to offer inside the lives of the people and operations of people within organizations they are trying to reach. A lot of that seems to come down to a simple gap in the alignment of priorities: while marketing teams contemplate data and speak energetically about really understanding their buyers as individuals, those interests are not reflected as clearly as they should be in what they end up saying.

 

So while organizations focus on what they are doing and think about that quantitatively and in terms of deliverables (because that is how they are judged internally), clients focus on how the brand or experience makes them feel and which of the many brand options available to them feels most like them (because that’s how they make their decisions). The role of the CMO is evolving at a rapid rate and equally for marketing professionals – the shift in digital, emotional space of your brand, developing conversations and experiences.

 

Integrated Experience - We can debate functions but in a hyper-connected digital world, everything that a business does — the entire “experience that it delivers” from internal employees to suppliers and customers — is now the scope of marketing. How are we as marketers shaping the conversation and our positioning in the marketplace? 

Technology is saturating the discipline—Marketing has more software intertwined in its mission today than any other profession.  Many CMOs have larger technology budgets than CIOs due to managing every interaction the brand has with customers. Using these capabilities requires new approaches to brand management and marketing strategy — as well as new competencies across the Marketing organization.

Branding is not linear anymore — it is not just what you say to your clients, but what your clients are saying to each other about your brand. Most importantly we must ensure brand strategies must be authentic with the audience whether it is transactional, strategic or ethereal.

When are we going to start to demand the professionalization of the Marketing discipline?