Md Consulting

There is a significant performance gap in what CMOs believe are important capabilities and what they deliver well today.

• These data and insights below come Dentsu Aegis Network.

• CMOs believe that creativity, data collection and customer experience are vital for their future business success, but they believe not to do these things well today.
• 84% of respondents believe data collection will be needed to drive customer insight, but only 49% think they deliver well on that today.
• I personally believe that data are key to drive the right insights and action plans.
• This is not just a question of getting data (I believe data are most of the time there) but more a question of leveraging what is available.
• The challenge is that these data are sometimes dispersed and people cannot find it easily and connect the dots, in order to bring clarity on what’s need to be done and articulate a compelling plan.
• In my current job, I’ve spent a lot of time building platform (leveraging tools like Power BI and TEAMS, both from Microsoft ) in order to organize and display data and find the right insights for compelling marketing / Category plan.
• This has been a joint effort between Marketing/ Category/ Sales excellence and Finance and we are still learning how to improve this (The key challenge being the usage / consumption of data and insights)
• This can help to drive usage of these data in order to build insight and and plan to address specific issues / opportunities.
• Authors of the report also attributed the performance gap to several factors, including CMO performance metrics that encourage short-term growth over long-term change, the lack of long-term strategic planning and underinvestment.
• This is also very interesting to see that almost half of respondents had strategic plans that looked ahead for just two years or less.
• There are some differences between sectors. CMOs in the automotive industry planned their marketing strategies the furthest out into the future (3.4 years), but those in media and entertainment, leisure and telecommunications had the shortest timeframes (2.0, 2.2 and 2.2 years, respectively).

Source:
Dentsu Aegis Network

Methodology:
Data is from the July 2019 Dentsu Aegis Network “CMO Survey 2019.” 1,000 CMOs or equivalent worldwide from various industries were surveyed by Kadence International during May 2019. Respondents were from Australia, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, Spain, UK and US.

In conclusion, I agree this is crucial to find the right balance between short term performance and medium / long term transformation. This is a journey and I encourage every marketeers / Category to reflect on this.

Feel free to share any learning on this journey.