Twice a year, Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business pulls together more than 400 of the best marketing minds in America and asks one essential question – How are you doing?
Okay, there are technically a bunch of questions, but the general tenor of the survey remains: Let us know what’s going on in your neck of the woods. Marketplace dynamics, social media, organization, and leadership are all covered, as are a multitude of other topics.
The topic of momentum, and how it applies to the workplace environment, has never been more relevant to marketers. As companies continue to climb — or attempt to climb — out of the Great Recession hole, they’re relying more heavily on their marketing teams to beat the bushes and truly know their customers.
These circumstances bore themselves out in the most recent CMO Survey. Respondents are more bullish about the U.S. economy than in recent quarters, up nearly 20 percent since February 2009. At the same time, marketing hires have dropped: 4.7 percent of respondents planned to hire in the next 12 months, down from 6.2 percent in 2011. (B2B companies, though, expect a hiring bump.) Companies are also still experiencing difficulty implementing social media and analytics into their marketing strategies.
Here are some tips from CMO Survey Director Christine Moorman on how to keep your marketing department challenged, and to keep the momentum you’ve earned.
GET THE RIGHT PEOPLE, AND THEN INTRODUCE THEM
This is especially important in the analytics world, the survey finds. Respondents were asked how challenging it was to find the right marketing analytics talent on a scale of one to seven, with one being “not at all challenging” and seven being “extremely challenging.” More than 83 percent selected higher than a four. “This is why IBM is going to India: We’re not producing enough people,” Moorman said. She suggested the General Mills model of constant recruiting.
Once the talent has arrived, it’s necessary to incorporate the team completely. Instead of having a separate area for the analytics team, Proctor and Gamble seats business analysts with brand managers, forcing them to interact. It’s reminiscent of Pixar, whose Steve Jobs-designed headquarters only has one set of bathrooms, in the building’s main atrium.
DON’T BE AFRAID TO LEARN FROM OTHER INDUSTRIES
Take Mexican cement company Cemex for example. They were having trouble delivering a ready-mix cement to job sites in a timely fashion, so they looked outside their industry for help. The natural fit, strangely? FedEx. FedEx ships millions of packages worldwide annually, and has the infrastructure to ensure the deliveries are done efficiently. Since there was no overlap in industries, Cemex and FedEx officials were able to meet and share best practices without risk of competition. “Part of this is, who has the momentum?” Moorman said. “Don’t be narrow-minded in the way you search for the right kinds of insights.”
USE SOCIAL MEDIA AS A TOOL, NOT A REPLACEMENT
Social media is not going away (Proof: social media spending is 7.4 percent of marketing budgets today, and respondents expect that to climb to 18.1 percent within the next five years), but companies are still having a hard time determining how to integrate it into their marketing strategies. Less than 7 percent of respondents said it had been integrated “very effectively,” the highest option on the survey. That level of integration has stayed nearly constant since 2011, indicating that, despite social media’s continued growth, companies still don’t entirely know how to use it. The most damning stat: Nearly 50 percent of respondents said they “have not been able to show the impact” of social media.
Part of the confusion, Moorman said, is that marketers need to realize social media is the new tool, and not to confuse that with marketing fundamentals. Who is the customer, and what do they want? Who is most valuable? Those questions sometimes get lost in the sea of likes and retweets. “A lot of CMOs have caught on, but the question is how to really develop a capability in this area—pulling it off for the long run—that’s a repeatable process,” Moorman said. Marketing departments need to be able to replicate social media success, not just hope to catch lightning in a viral bottle.
MAKE ALL OF YOUR EMPLOYEES “LISTENING POSTS”
Marketing budgets are rebounding, yes, but companies would also be wise to utilize their own employees more efficiently. Marketing department employees are paid to keep their ears to the floor, follow the most recent trends, and react. But what about the salesforce? The sales department is an often under-tapped resource in companies, Moorman said, and should be turned to for insight more often. This is especially true at B2B companies, where the salesforce is often gathering competitive intelligence anyway, and could easily share with marketing.
For more information about The CMO Survey, please visit cmosurvey.org.
This article was originally published in Connote Magazine by Bradford Pearson.
