Marketing increasingly complex, challenged: CMO Council 24 February, 2009 By Vanessa Ho

PromoPipeline Exclusive Channel Promotions Find Out How You Can Make Money Today! ENROLL FREE! >> Factory Direct Should Not be Cheaper William Vanderbilt - Innovative Learning Channels Cloud Ecosystem II: A Candid Conversation with Oracle Beth Vanni - Amazon Consulting Cloud Ecosystem: A Candid Conversation with Rackspace Hosting Beth Vanni - Amazon Consulting Channel Manager Compensation William Vanderbilt - Innovative Learning Channels Financial Expertise William Vanderbilt - Innovative Learning Channels

Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the CMO Council, believes the reason why marketing operational models are becoming complex and more crucial is because of the globalization of markets.

"They need to increase efficiency and effectiveness [in order to] to get intelligence from customer data, resources from supply chain, etc... and integrate that," said Neale-May. "IT addresses the process and people and there needs to be a tighter coupling with CIOs and CMOs."

The report, entitled "Calibrate How You Operate," interviewed over 400 senior marketing executives around the world from every major industry sector. One of the findings indicated that respondents feared they will be unable to implement the needed marketing platforms and automated processes required to effectively support strategic growth initiatives.

Neale-May noted that what is happening with marketing today is the uptake of cloud-based services with marketing vanguards embracing software-as-a-service and Web-hosted models for things such as demand generation, CRM, e-mail campaigns, analytics and marketing performance management that will help automate the marketing task.

"Every aspect of marketing is now being delivered through cloud-based computing systems," he added.

The reason why, said Neale-May, is because a cloud-model is more efficient, has a low cost of entry, rapid ROI, easy to deploy and use as it is done through a browser interface. As well, IT bottlenecks can be alleviated but right now SaaS is only partly being used because marketing isn't seen by IT as a strategic function.

Another hold back of using SaaS is 83 per cent of marketers said they face change-resistant corporate cultures, conflicts and competition between internal constituencies, and a resistance to operational accountability, visibility and measurement.

Neale-May said one way to overcome organizational resistance is to have a CMO that is globally and operationally-centered.

"Those from diversified backgrounds can get different people working together for all facets of customer experience, service, support and program policies and pricing and get all that data integrated in one single view," he added. "If [you don't have an understanding of all of this], you can't develop marketing activities that are meaningful."

The research shows that even as global companies aspire to keep pace with dramatic market shifts and uncertain economic forecasts, major operational change appears extremely difficult to achieve.

The study underscores the critical need for marketing to drive operational effectiveness and optimally structure, resource, and run today's digitally driven, customer-centric and globally distributed marketing organizations.

More than 60 per cent of respondents believed that marketing operational transformation is an essential area of focus. However, only 4.5 per cent were very satisfied with their current level of marketing operational visibility, accountability and output.

Overall marketing operational effectiveness is considered the least developed operational area by nearly 50 per cent of respondents.

Investments in web-centric platforms will continue in 2009 as the majority of marketers indicate they will invest in areas including e-mail campaign management, web content management, eMetrics and web analytics platforms. Only eight per cent of respondents would look to eProcurement and strategic sourcing, an area that could yield significant budgetary savings and operational efficiencies, as a component of their marketing operations mix.

While there is no clear method for budget development, only 10 per cent of respondents indicated that marketing budgets were defined by a CMO-developed strategic agenda, while an equal number of executives saw little to no forecasting, planning or budgeting within their organizations.

Other key findings from the study include 16 per cent of marketers indicated that regardless of structure, marketing remains fragmented, lacking cohesion, integration and accountability. It is clear that marketers are eager to embrace automation as a means to process optimization and effectiveness as only 19 per cent indicated an organizational unwillingness to utilize marketing automation tools

Customer engagement and customer centric communications are top of mind for marketers as there is a clear shift towards targeted, focused and precise communications. Many of the top operational improvements targeted by marketers revolve around optimizing customer engagement, including improving go-to-market strategies and efficiency and delivering a unified and consistent message.

As well, Neale-May advised that marketers should concentrate on three critical areas in order to build out a robust marketing intelligence system that will leverage cloud-based services. The first area is customer intelligence which includes things like looking at customer experience, customer feedback and customer revenue optimization. The second area is market intelligence, which means looking at what competitors are doing and have the ability to shift and change in the global environment. The last area that marketers should focus on is campaign intelligence which includes activities like tracking marketing spend, the rate of closure and conversion and the retention of customers.