There's no denying that marketing is moving at warp speed, but beyond collecting vast amounts of data, most marketing organisations don't know how to use it to produce insights that will drive business growth, according to Marc de Swaan Arons, CMO of Millward Brown Vermeer.
De Swaan Arons is leading Millward Brown's Insights 2020 study, a follow up to Millward Brown's 2014 Marketing 2020 study that went on to form the basis of the biggest selling issue of the Harvard Business Review.
The 2014 report identified that because traditional drivers were no longer providing competitive advantage, organisations were leaning towards customer centricity. For that, there is a need for big insights to make marketing and business decisions but that is “a much bigger issue than collecting data” de Swaan Arons told AdNews.
With Insights 2020, Millward Brown is seeking to find out, on a global scale, exactly what it means for an organisation to be “customer centric” and how you make that a reality through the way that data and insights are utilised. Australian marketers and insights leaders are invited to take the survey.
“What we really found was that in this connectivity age, traditional value drivers just aren’t providing the competitive advantage anymore so everyone is talking about customer centricity, but then when you start to dig in to what they mean, and how it looks, there is very little consistency as to how you drive that through an organisation,” said de Swaan Arons.
The study is already being backed by WPP's Sir Martin Sorrell and Unilever CMO Keith Weed among others and the findings will be revealed for the first time globally at the AANA RESET conference in Sydney in October.
In the early findings, Millward Brown has identified a significant correlation between companies that over-perform in terms of revenue growth, and those that have high levels of organisational customer centricity.
It has also identified 10 drivers that are the differentiator between over- and under-performance. What's clear, according to de Swaan Arons, who will present the findings at AANA RESET, is that companies that are over performing revenue wise have a very different take on the importance of insights and data within the business compared to companies not performing so well.
“If you are a marketing or insights leader you're likely sitting at your desk saying ‘this is moving at warp speed’. And on one hand is the excitement of all the things we ever dreamt of being possible somehow, but on the other hand quite frankly is a terrific fear about over-investing in the wrong thing, at the same time as under-investing in programs that turn out to be dramatically important and drive competitive advantage,” he said.
“Our goal with insights 2020 is that if you join this as a participant you assure yourself of being linked at the hip to leading edge learning. Things that you can go back to your company and actually do. We want marketers to walk out of the room smarter, better equipped and more confident,” he said.
There are already more than 10,000 respondents from 80 markets, and more than 300 in-depth interviews with marketing and insights leaders around the globe, but more Australian marketing leaders need to take the survey so that the industry here can benefit from the research and identify where Australia fits into the global picture.
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