It's no secret that the demands of a chief marketing officer (CMO) are growing exponentially, as brands eye customer-centric business models. But two separate pieces of research from Experian and Oracle Marketing Cloud have pointed to data and support of the CEO as hurdles CMOs will have to jump to navigate their expanded role.
Oracle Marketing Cloud, in association with the Aberdeen Group, compiled a global study which found that in the Asia Pacific region, the top pressure that CMOs are experiencing is access to data, with 71% noting this ahead of lack of budget and content generation.
Similarly Experian's whitepaper, Customer Centric Transformation – How Australian CMOs are Driving the Change, spoke to 20 Australian CMOs from leading organisations and more than 100 senior marketers to find out how they were navigating a push by brands to move into customer-centric models.
Experian surveyed four different groups of CMOs on the path to customer-centricity – from “beginners” right up to “progressive” – and looked at the frameworks and factors that characterised each group.
Experian GM consumer insights and targeting David Chinn told Adnews it found that 42% of CMOs in “beginner” organisations were challenged by siloed data and a further 50% by poor quality data. Meanwhile in “progressive” organisations, 100% were routinely collecting customer feedback, 85% were integrating communication channels and a further 77% are using big data and analytics to boost customer experience.
“If I were in one of the follower categories looking up the line at the “progressives” there is a different set of skills that come with that,” Chinn said.
“For me digital, addressable advertising is a massive part of becoming customer-centric. I'd say CMOs need to become digitally native very quickly because those measurable touch points that you have with your customers, you're having them across digital channels.”
Chinn said that there wasn't any particular industry sector that had more “progressive” CMOs, rather individual companies were moving ahead on their own.
He also said that increasingly, CMOs were being seen as owning everything to do with the customer and acting as the “voice of the customer” within a business, rather than someone responsible for pure advertising.
But he said one commonality was that that 100% of CMOs from the top two groups had the ear of the CEO compared to just 19% of beginners.
“Really, if you don't have buy in from the top you can't move forward to customer-centricity, the way to think about it is almost like a traffic light,” Chinn said.
“One of the things in the research that became very clear was that you need people to move towards customer-centric outcomes and sufficient budget point that way. To secure budget around change really requires CEO buy in.
“The second thing is that all CMOs had a structured framework to the measure the ROI from customer-centric initiatives, so if you're going to build a measurement framework or a set of KPIs, you can't really do that without a CEO.”
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