Digital is the Marketing Game Changer

Digital is the marketing game changer, according to a CMO Insights Report from Accenture.

According to the report, the traditional brand-centric marketing approach has “long lost the appeal it once had” for attracting consumers and assuring a healthy rate of return from marketing investments.

Today’s consumer is more in control than ever -- and causing more turbulence for today’s marketers, according to the report. As consumers delve deeper into digital and interact across multiple devices and channels, they expect brands to fit their needs of the moment with relevant experiences. If brands don’t measure up, consumers move on.

As a result, the marketing function needs to undergo a fundamental change over the next five years to stay on top of changing consumer behavior and channel proliferation. Marketers will need to hire, re-skill, and redeploy people to improve efficiency, agility, and responsiveness. They will need to stay relevant and engage with customers through the most convenient channel and the most relevant offer.

What’s more, facing increasing complexity, CMOs who want their companies to achieve high performance are transforming their operating model, tuning up their business practices, carefully selecting their agencies and partners, and upgrading their talent. Their ability to restructure the organization and work horizontally to deliver seamless and relevant customer experiences across all touchpoints all day and every day “will be essential to survival in the global marketplace,” according to the report.

In such a complex and unforgiving environment, the report found that CMOs capitalize on five capabilities to improve their company’s performance: offering innovation, customer analytics, digital orientation, customer engagement, and marketing operations.

Of these five, digital orientation scores the weakest performance—at the exact moment when it needs to be the strongest. Digital orientation—which Accenture defines as working across the organization to infuse a digital focus in all business processes and functions—is critical to achieving success across virtually any marketing strategy.

Digital orientation has the largest “performance gap” among the five marketing capabilities. But, digital orientation can have a profound impact on sales. The performance of digital orientation in high-growth companies is 21% greater than in negative sales growth companies (3.4 versus 2.8), even when the degree of importance is fairly uniform (3.81 versus 3.57). CMOs in high-growth companies have found a less turbulent path by improving their digital focus.

Recent Content

Membership and Pricing

Videos and podcasts

Membership and Pricing