As the marketing landscape continues to change at a rapid pace, with new technologies appearing every few weeks and businesses requiring new approaches all the time, marketers are in a unique role in their organisations. It’s often up to them to lead the way through change by getting everyone on the same page. Today’s marketers need leadership skills to do their jobs well and guide their companies to connect with customers better than ever before. Several of our contributors on CMO.com have touched on some of the skills and strategies required of today’s marketers.
At the Marketing Society’s Global Conference in London, several speakers touched on the important role of senior marketers in the rapidly changing digital world. Nigel Vaz, global chief strategy officer at SapientNitro, mentioned the need for businesses to be adaptive, especially in how they communicate and build relationships with their customers. Aviva CEO Mark Wilson described how he approaches running his business with a sense of disruption, using something he calls the “proposition tweet” to determine whether or not he’ll kill a product. The need to be bold and disruptive was a common thread running throughout the conference.
Thomas Barta, CMO leadership thought leader, keynote speaker, and author, shared some of the skills he believes are vital for any customer experience leader. Barta considers the shaping of a company’s customer experience (CX) to be “perhaps, the biggest leadership challenge of a business.” The problem is that CX leaders often lack targeted leadership training. According to Barta, CX leaders need a place at the table with a company’s top leaders because the customer experience journey is vital to the business as a whole.
When new platforms are introduced, it’s tempting for marketers to dive right in and begin using them to push content out. For some brands, this makes sense, especially if the brand’s customer are accustomed to interacting with it on a variety of channels. For other companies, a new platform may not be relevant to its customers, so immediate buy-in doesn’t make sense. Rachel Hatton, chief strategy officer, OLIVER Group UK, encourages marketers to be more like Einstein when it comes to new platforms. This means questioning everything and approaching them with an attitude of “purposeful play.” The best new platforms relate to real life.
Chris Taylor, CIO of the Telegraph Media Group, spoke with CMO.com about the role of innovation in a company. Instead of tasking only a few people within an organisation with coming up with new ideas, Taylor advocates for innovation to be a part of everyone’s job description. “We seek to make it clear to everyone in the organisation they have licence and support to be innovative,” Taylor said. Furthermore, he added the importance of being prepared to take risks and try new things so people will feel they have the space to be innovative with their ideas.
David Mayer and Simon Glynn, senior partners and directors of EMEA at Lippincott, shared how important it is for a brand to build emotional bonds with its customers. Emotional bonds, they say, help customers develop not only loyalty to a brand, but love for a brand that allows them to forgive mistakes in operation. A brand might perform flawlessly, but without any emotional bonds in place, customers tend to align with the brand they love over the brand that performs better. Mayer and Glynn outlined some important steps for marketers to better drive a brand’s emotional agenda with its customers.
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