The pandemic has demonstrated that adaptability and originality have become three critical performance markers for any marketing organization. After a year in which plans were formed and abandoned numerous times, marketing leaders need to reconsider how their teams function.
Few marketing executives wish to return to the frequently glacial pace of decision-making and ultra-long timelines that characterized large organizations prior to the pandemic. Even the largest brands are thinking like start-ups these days. Uncertainty is a given, and agility has become the accepted standard.
Marketers have rapidly embraced new workflows over the last year and a half, acquired and developed new skills, and braved time constraints like never before. They have banded together and collaborated in novel ways, understanding their colleagues better and implementing beneficial changes with far-reaching consequences.
Here are a few of the several marketing lessons that were learned along the way:
Seize marketing’s expanded remit
Today’s CMOs are critical to corporate transformation, as their responsibilities have expanded beyond traditional marketing roles. They must reintroduce marketing as a function that encompasses more than demand generation, advertising, and promotion. The CMO’s primary priority should be new logo acquisition and client retention, loyalty, and enrichment. Additionally, Forrester’s research demonstrates the high correlation and interdependence between brand experience, customer experience, and employee experience. It is vital to drive and connect these three traits for business transformation and growth.
Also Read: The B2B Marketing World Goes Virtual to Survive the Pandemic
Placing the consumer first
Obsession with the customer — putting the customer at the heart of leadership, strategy, and operations — helps the business to feel and respond to market conditions. Customer focus requires more than providing excellent customer service. It’s about adjusting mind-sets, realigning work assignments, recalibrating performance, and securing money to establish client obsession as the business’s cornerstone. For instance, as new customer journeys emerge as digital adoption accelerates during COVID-19, being customer-obsessed sets a culture and way of working that prioritizes customer consideration when developing products, brands, and processes.
Ensure cross-functional alignment
At a time when consumer demands and expectations are changing at a breakneck pace, more agility and alignment across product, marketing, and sales may help businesses expand faster. The changing purchasing landscape necessitates significant changes to the CMO’s position and a larger strategic perspective in order to integrate and operate successfully across the formerly fragmented sales, product, and marketing activities. Indeed, firms that successfully integrate these three fundamental responsibilities see increased growth and profitability.
Hold a stance
Unlike in the past, when businesses avoided political concerns, today’s drive for corporate conscience comes from a variety of sources, not only consumers and investors. Employees are the most direct link between what a brand says and what it actually does in the market. A convergence of events in 2020, including the pandemic and a resurgent Black Lives Matter movement, pushed many companies to consider whether or not to enter the political sphere. CMOs play a critical role in analyzing how their brand and corporate values match the issue and selecting when their firm should take a position.
The pandemic has altered the way we work, behave, and operate fundamentally. To successfully navigate out of the post-pandemic world, CMOs must continue to embrace change.
For more such updates follow us on Google News TalkCMO News.
