Today’s increasingly complex, distributed and digitally driven marketing ecosystem is challenging global marketers to better integrate and manage data, best of breed solutions, creative resources, brand assets and go-to-market functions. Marketing process improvement, efficiency and yield is directly tied to more effective use of tools, platforms, analytics and intelligence that improve rich media content creation, relevancy, delivery, access, control, workflow, partner collaboration, market engagement, sales lead provisioning, as well as campaign measurement and tracking.
These are the conclusions from research by the CMO Council and Marketing Supply Chain Institute.
In other words, to be or remain successful in today’s competitive and global world, you need an organised and automated marketing supply chain. Embracing the need for real-time, adaptive marketing practices and process
improvement platforms is a strategic priority for brands.
Product life cycles are shorter and more tenuous. Consumer audiences are more connected, opinionated and virally influential. Supply chains and customer markets are more complex and distributed globally. And demand side marketing and sell-through requirements are now more resource intensive and channel-driven, requiring greater integration and alignment with the field.
CMO’s are struggling with the heightened pace of technology change and the demand for greater insight and innovation across rapidly evolving global markets. Centralizing market/customer data and extracting meaningful intelligence from vast volumes of transactional, behavioural, and attitudinal information is pressing many to form tighter linkages with IT groups and third-party sources for supplemental profiling of current customers and prospective buyers.
Despite these pressing requirements, most marketers are hamstrung with antiquated legacy systems and lack of resources to implement marketing automation projects that improve the effectiveness and performance of marketing teams and partners.
Mapping and modelling the marketing mix in an integrated, campaign-centric way has become a real challenge for CMO’s. Advanced marketing planning tools are in short supply and reliance on spread sheets and historical spend patterns is the norm. Media and audience fragmentation, as well as the differing characteristics and yield of print and electronic channels, has increased the complexity of marketing and media planning. Marketers are working with a plethora of traditional and alternative agency and media partners to determine the optimal ways to go-to-market. However, few report success with truly integrated, multi-level, multi-channel marketing campaigns from a sole source. Internal functional isolation and resistance to marketing transformation is hindering the full embrace and benefits of digital marketing platforms and practices. These include better workflow and collaboration across the marketing ecosystem, improved execution speed and effectiveness, better accountability and control of spend, as well as more insights and visibility into campaign impact and ROI on a business level.
Synchronizing demand and supply chains to improve “brand logistics” is seeing the advent of sophisticated outsourced service providers that are transforming the marketing supply chain with IT systems that reduce waste, improve sustainability and ensure the continuous availability and timely delivery of field marketing and sales components. They are bringing more rigor and discipline to sourcing and provisioning of “marketing consumables” – such as packaging, sales literature, brochures, product samples, premiums, information kits, merchandising materials, signage, documentation, etc. – much of which can easily become obsolete or languish as unused inventory in warehouses, depots and fulfillment centres.
Platforms for localizing, translating and reconfiguring marketing content are part of “the race to project a global face” and the desire to “connect with the community” as country and regional marketers target, serve and accommodate more diverse socio-economic, ethnic, demographic, cultural, religious and geographic markets. Marketing organizations are looking at ways to centralize, protect, share and better use brand assets, market intelligence and best practice knowledge across their global organizations.
Marketers, however, have a tendency to focus on immediate tactical needs and comfort zone activities to the detriment of longer term, higher value strategic initiatives. This can change with a more data-centric view of the customer, combined with deeper thinking about where digital marketing execution systems can enable business performance innovation, revenue optimization and agile operational efficiency, as well as customer retention and gratification.
Click here to go to the CMO Council article.
