Marketing is undergoing a profound shift as legacy approaches are no longer able to drive the growth that companies require today.
By Dee Chetty, Accenture Interactive lead in Africa
To thrive in the modern environment, brands must re-imagine what marketing means, what it can do, and how it can support the organisation’s return to growth.
Traditional brands, which achieved economies of scale by developing mass products for physical channels, are being overtaken, often by smaller new and nimble disruptive companies that offer a unique customer proposition, establish a direct customer connection, and quickly build the capabilities to fulfil customers’ needs using innovative digital technologies.
Even large companies are capitalising on customers’ liquid expectations as consumers constantly re-evaluate their purchase decisions and choose brands that are most relevant to them in the moment.
What distinguishes these innovative companies is their ability to understand and anticipate their customers’ intentions and preferences and leverage their agile operating models to create the experiences and offers that align with customer expectations.
While many marketing teams within established brands are pressured with cost efficiencies and looking for effective ways to contribute towards the business’ bottom line, the change required to deliver relevant and personalised experiences across all touch points is simply overwhelming. Many of these teams continue to exist in organisational silos, rely heavily on their agency partners, remain highly product-focused, and deliver disjointed, ineffective experiences typically lead by technical capability limitations.
Additionally, marketers still view the world as traditional. They’ve all acknowledged that social is a key to the brand’s success today, but they allow external forces to take control of, limit and define the brand experiences. In reality, everything is becoming more complex. Companies that continue to hang on to their antiquated understanding of the customer landscape, and talk to consumers in the same old way, using outdated marketing techniques and communication channels, will fail to meet these new demands. In so doing, they’re losing out on their ability to become active contributors to the business’ growth and sustainability.
There’s a clear and growing need to rapidly accelerate digital transformation to keep step with innovative competitors and create data-driven, personalised, seamless experiences to maintain relevance among consumers who are growing increasingly disenchanted with companies’ lack of digital savviness.
Twenty percent of consumers who switched brands in 2017 did so because the incumbent provider’s digital and online service and support solutions failed to meet their needs, according to Accenture’s Global Consumer Pulse research.
The cost of not embracing this demand for hyper-relevance in the South African market alone, cost companies R663 billion in 2017 in potential lost revenue due to customer switching, with a lack of relevance cited by 66% of consumers as the major reason for their decision to switch.
Moreover, the research suggests that companies can no longer count on loyalty to help them hold their ground. As the era of loyalty marketing wanes, businesses shouldn’t count on incentives to keep customers loyal, or to motivate them to continue purchasing goods and services. In essence, customers today demand personalisation across all brand touch points and experiences. For these personalised interactions to be meaningful and impactful, they must be relevant to the individual, but it’s only when brands apply intelligence around customer data to contextualise and understand their needs more deeply that they create hyper-relevance.
Accenture’s recent chief marketing officer (CMO) research reveals how pioneering marketing leaders are challenging the status quo and inspiring lasting change by embracing technology as an enabler of these new digital capabilities. This ensures their organisation can respond quickly to changing customer demands and expectations and deliver hyper-relevant customer experiences. But they aren’t simply throwing more money at the problem to achieve these outcomes. According to Accenture’s research, they’re not spending significantly more than their peers on customer experience (CX) and innovation as a share of their total marketing budgets.
Instead, they’re reinventing for the now and the new. They’re rejecting a broken marketing culture by challenging conventional wisdom and the status quo, and they’re unlocking value by driving collaboration, particularly with other C-suite executives.
Pioneering CMOs adopt a different mindset, rejecting conventional approaches to rather focus on their people as they establish a customer-centric organisation and cultures that shape marketing strategy.
They create alternative sources of disruptive business growth by experimenting with new and innovative emerging technologies to drive breakthrough innovation or create entirely new revenue streams.
They leverage analytics to apply data-derived granular insights that inform their growth strategies, and create a single view of the customer that can personalise engagements at every stage in the customer lifecycle, reinvent CX at every touchpoint, and predict buying behaviour among consumers who are constantly re-evaluating their choices.
Future-oriented CMOs also understand that their organisations must remain agile and in a permanent state of flux to successfully meet these ever-evolving customer needs. They’re far more likely to pivot their marketing strategy in response to shifting customer expectations around trust, transparency, multichannel engagements, relevant products and services and immersive experiences.
In addition, pioneering CMOs are rewiring their organisations with a new, more connected operating model that heightens collaboration among internal groups and external partners, aligning the right skills and behaviours to drive sustained growth.
It’s an approach Accenture calls ‘Living Marketing’ –marketing that strengthen the basics, creates and delivers top-line growth by pivoting to new capabilities such as creating living experiences and ecosystems that work as a collaboration engine, and ensure brands, products and services are hyper-relevant to customers and form part of a unique, personalised experience by relying on data and emerging technologies to create living platforms that shape engagements. Living Marketing evolves consistently, requires speed and quick turn-around between different capabilities to deliver an orchestrated “living” experience of marketing.
In this new paradigm, hyper-relevance and personalisation are dynamic, happen in real-time, and differ for each brand. These brands live in the moment and are able to respond to customers’ desires for deep, authentic connections across all brand channels and touchpoints.
A living marketing organisation is built for speed and responsiveness and works as a connected organism committed to ensuring flawless, seamless CX across every customer touchpoint. It is powered by relevant skills, a purposeful culture, and optimised ways of working.
Living marketing organisations also constantly optimise their cost structures, and evaluate hard and soft (non-sales) metrics such as advocacy and brand health to deliver a new form of ROI – Return on the Individual. They are masters of recalibration, shifting from batch quarterly/yearly spending to fluid spending. And they leverage real-time performance measurements to understand the impact of specific marketing activities.
Accenture research shows that organisations that get CX right in this regard outperform their peers on a number of measures–from customer loyalty and marketing ROI to revenue gains. Perhaps most tellingly, they meet or exceed their customers’ expectations for CX 91% of the time, which 21% higher than their peers.
CMOs clearly have a tremendous opportunity right now – a chance to reinvent their roles and secure future growth for their companies in this challenging environment by becoming a living business. It’s an exciting journey that offers pioneering CMOs the chance to evolve and adapt ahead of the curve and at the speed of customers. However, in order to realise these benefits, the time for marketers to take action is now.