Marketing is changing fast and marketing organizations need to adapt to this new reality. Our survey shows that CEOs and CMOs do not feel prepared for the challenges emerging from hyper-personalization, endless analytics opportunities and the increased P&L responsibility of marketing. In this paper, Roland Berger gives insights into how to tackle these challenges, highlights which key trends are sustainable and provides recommendations on how to build a marketing organization of the future – a powerful marketing engine.
The era of static billboards, cold calling and mass mail shots is coming to an end, replaced by new digital tools such as microtargeting, personalization and social media influencers. In the future, data will be king. Marketing organizations will have more P&L responsibility as marketing often represents the last resort to win new customers and increase average basket sizes in a world of interchangeable products and services – companies will have to adapt to this new reality or risk marketing meltdown.
These trends are creating challenges for existing marketing organizations. Our survey shows that marketing decision makers do not feel prepared – 45% still see themselves as traditional sales & marketing organizations; only 8% claim to have a high or very high digital maturity level; and 75% are not able to measure the impact of marketing activities.
Our key recommendation is that companies should transform their marketing organization into a true marketing engine . Marketing should be in the lead and leverage customer insights to influence and inform product management and R&D processes and provide the basis for end-to-end customer journeys. Marketing should be triple A – fully embracing analytics, using artificial intelligence across activities and setting up a best-in-class agency model. Sales needs to be the new currency of marketing – marketing needs to drive revenue directly. Read our study to discover more of our recommendations and learn about our approach for building marketing engines.
Roland Berger gives recommendations on how to create the marketing engine of the future. Marketing will be more data driven, while direct sales will become an essential key performance indicator.
