The recent Chief Marketing & Sales Officer Forum had a number of leading CMOs appear, including Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, Ford’s Jim Farley, and Google’s Margo Georgiadis. McKinsey’s Marc Singer pulled together three key principles from the talks:
1. Strategy is more important than ever.
The digital revolution has put us into a “golden age of marketing,” according to Georgiadis. There are many powerful tools available to marketers looking to reach and influence customers. Singer is surprised, though, that marketers often don’t have a strategy; they have a collection of tactics that they think is a strategy. Singer said, “I’m often asked, ‘What should our social media strategy be ‘ My answer is always: ‘What’s your strategy ‘ You need to answer that question first. All the alluring possibilities of social and digital media can easily distract our focus from what really matters to our companies—and to our customers.”
2. To engage customers and influence brand perception, marketers need to build trust.
Companies are no longer in complete control of their brand, because customers have an important and sometimes decisive voice. “But marketers still have enormous influence around how customers understand and interact with their brand,” says Singer. “In today’s era of customer engagement, that influence comes increasingly in the form of ‘partnerships’ with customers who can help communicate the brand.”
3. Companies need to ‘instrument’ their organizations around target customer segments.
Leading companies have expanded their idea of what ROI should mean. It’s more than just market share and sales; it could also be innovation, R&D savings, employee morale, and so on. “Ford’s Farley makes the connection between ‘brand favorability’ —the customer’s overall perception of a brand relative to competing brands—and pricing power,” notes Singer. “Farley has found that brand favorability is deeply driven by what Ford does in social media.”
Singer feels that in order to get to meaningful ROI, companies really need to figure out what customers matter to them. This is actually an organizational challenge, and companies have to organize themselves around their customers first.
Source: Forbes
