For the last few months, we’ve been surveying leading marketers on the future of marketing – canvassing their views on potential trends and their likely impact.   The results were pretty interesting.  Below is a quick look at the most imminent trends – those that are likely to hit next year.

1. Expanded Span of Control: This is perhaps the most fundamental shift that marketers see happening.  Marketing’s primary role will no longer be marcomms or branding, but rather end-to-end experience management.  With fierce competition and more demanding consumers than ever before, Marketing needs to focus on providing real value – not just driving short-term sales. This shift requires greater cross-functional collaboration and ideally greater control over product/service innovation and non-Marketing touchpoints, such as call centers or retailers.  (IBM’s latest data suggests there’s still work to do here – currently, only half of CMOs have good influence over innovation or experience).

2. Marcomm Campaigns Designed to Produce Insights: Accurate insight is critical to boosting Marketing’s credibility and thus influence over non-traditional customer-facing activities.  As such, insight generation loomed large in marketers’ view of the future.  Marketers see themselves becoming producers of insight – not just users of insight produced by Market Research.  Indeed, many marketers already plan campaigns with the dual aims of attitude/behavior change AND data capture.

3. Data-Driven Decision Making: Marketers currently rely on their own judgment/intuition for about 50% of decisions, according to research by our sister program – the Market Research Executive Board. Judgment enables fast, principled decision making in many cases, but often results in biased decisions based on false assumptions.  In 2012, marketers plan to take advantage of newly available data to infuse more science into decision making.

4. Agile Planning: Instead of one-off planning sessions once or twice a year, marketing functions are shifting towards iterative, ongoing planning.  This relies on better use of real-time data and quick feedback.  Many leading companies now review marketing performance on a weekly basis and adjust as often – if needed.  Some companies (including P&G) also send out automated alerts as soon as key metrics hit a predetermined high/low threshold, enabling the project owner to learn and take quick action.

5. Hyper-Targeting: Marketers plan to target more than 50% (!) of messages based on context (time, place, local weather, likely mood etc.) as well as static demographics and pscychographics.  It’s a shift from “Jane, working mom” to “Jane, working mom, at the gas station on her way to work.”  Better tracking and automation will enable this.

The common thread through these trends?  Big data.  Easier, faster access to customer/market data is the enabler of pretty much every trend above.  Given this growing importance, MLC’s major research next year will explore marketing analytics best practices.  Email me to learn more about this research.

We’re about to launch a substantial consumer survey on personalization.  It will explore how consumers value different types of relevance and how they make trade-offs between increased relevance and decreased privacy.

Below are six of the bigger and edgier hypotheses we’re testing.  If you have any other suggestions/thoughts, please email me soon and we’ll try to add them to the survey. Read More »

One of marketers’ top priorities next year is digital integration, or – more specifically – adapting to the increasingly central role of digital in the marketing mix.  In a recent MLC poll, B2C marketers rated this their second highest priority.

Despite several years of slowly shifting mindsets, Digital is too often still treated as its own stand-alone function, separate from Promotions, PR, Direct Marketing etc.  It should, by contrast, be treated as a part of all marcomm efforts.  Here are a few reasons why: Read More »

MLC is hosting a webinar on mapping the purchase path next week (Nov 15th).  Michael Allenson, Senior Director at Maritz Research, will be sharing advice on how to understand and improve the purchase process.

Marketers no longer understand how consumers buy.  New technologies (mobile commerce, price comparison apps, price trackers, social buying etc.) have transformed the decision making process.  The problem is – consumers don’t understand how to buy either.  Too often, new tools and information actually overwhelm consumers and make purchase decisions harder, not easier.  MLC’s 2011 research found that the average purchase decision now involves 12% more research than it did 2 years ago and a lot of anxiety too. Read More »

Most marketers know that today’s cynical consumers trust each other more than they trust brands.  And they know that trust boosts chances of purchase.

However, some marketers underweight two key elements of trust: Read More »

Marketers have always found ways to grab consumers’ attention to get their message across.  But attention is scarcer than ever – given marketing message overload (ad fatigue), DVR uptake (ad skipping) and the rise of multi-tasking (lower attention/focus in general).

The latest tactics for breaking through increasingly high barriers to attention all have some serious limitations: Read More »

In a world of overflowing choice, shoppers get overwhelmed by purchase decisions.  Finding the right product can be even harder in-store than online, since you can’t filter by category or consumer ratings, for example.  Indeed, MLC’s recent research shows that consumers tend to find websites simpler than stores.  And with foot traffic on the decline, simplifying the in-store experience is more important than ever to entice shoppers back into stores.  [For information on other ways to boost foot traffic, please see Courtney's recent post or shoot her an email.]

The simplest retail experiences involve staff who help you find the right products for your needs.  But with high turnover, it can be hard for sales reps to learn different segments’ needs and product preferences.

What store staff need is a simple way to guess what customers want. Since preferences aren’t always visible, staff need a few quick questions for diagnosing needs – and the fewer the better (to avoid annoying customers).

In some ideal cases, a single question will be enough to send shoppers to the right section of the store.  One pet store, for instance, asks the question, “Do you buy your pet a Christmas present?”  This question alone helps determine whether to direct pet owners to the luxury section of the store or not.

Another great example of the single-question segmentation technique comes from a beer maker. To identify their target customers, they simply ask: “Do you like to get drunk quickly?”  An elegant segmentation technique indeed!

But finding those one or two questions that accurately predict shopper needs is no easy task. Most companies turn to their segmentation studies, but these are typically 100+ question surveys that can’t possibly be repeated in a store environment.

La-Z-Boy has solved this conundrum.  They reduced their 100-question segmentation survey down to just 2 simple diagnostic questions.  These 2 questions enable floor staff to predict which section of the store will be right for each shopper – with about 80% accuracy.

MLC members, to see La-Z-Boy’s in-store segmentation questions and learn how they came up with them, please click here.

As the function responsible for the moment of intersection between markets and products, services, and brands, Marketing is under intense pressure to adapt – not only to the ways consumers and customers want information, but also to the increasing ubiquity of data.

In our conversations with CMOs and marketing leaders around the world, the consistent theme we’re hearing is one of agility – marketers and their teams need to be able to tackle a wider variety of tasks and responsibilities in order to take advantage of fast shifts in the market.

Want to develop a more agile team? Read on for some tips gleaned from our conversations: Read More »

57% of MLC members think strategic planning is the marketing activity with the greatest chance for improvement.  It’s no secret why: marketing planning is notoriously siloed, confusing, and difficult to evaluate. And it’s harder than ever in today’s volatile environment.

MLC’s collection of best practices in marketing planning all have one thing in common: reducing complexity.  These best practices all involve stakeholders from outside Marketing, keep detail to a minimum, and make evaluation metrics explicit.

For more, check out our insights on Avoiding the Pitfalls of Marketing Planning. Read More »

Gap has been experimenting aggressively with a wide range of SoMoLo (social media, mobile, and location-based) technologies for connecting with consumers.  Below are some of the main lessons from their experiments.

MLC members, for other best-in-class examples of social and mobile executions, please see MLC’s Mobile Marketing Resource Center and Social Media Showcase.

At the ANA’s Digital and Social Conference, Gap’s marketing director (Chris Gayton) and CRM director (Summer Riley) gave a very enlightening talk on their work.  Here are some of the top lessons from Gap’s approach to SoMoLo: Read More »