Kelly Jo Golson is the Chief Brand, Communications and Consumer Experience Officer at Advocate Health where she oversees marketing and consumer experience for a leading healthcare system.

Golson brings nearly 30 years of industry experience spanning consumerism, brand, marketing, digital strategy, public affairs and internal communications. A leader with Advocate since 2007, she previously held roles with Methodist Healthcare System, St. Luke’s Episcopal Healthcare and Memorial Hermann Healthcare.

Scott Davis: With all the shifts that have gone on through COVID and now an economic downturn, what matters the most to you right now as a chief marketing officer leading one of the biggest U.S. health systems?

Kelly Jo Golson: You know, there’s a long list of things that matter, right? But one of the things that keeps coming back to me is credibility. Patients and consumers are bombarded with noise and misinformation. Being the voice of trust and reliability, and the place consumers and patients turn to for accurate information and a trustworthy experience is our top priority.

SD: Do you think healthcare has been fairly or unfairly punished over the last three to five years in terms of breaking consumer trust, or is it just the general environment of everything being highly scrutinized?

KJ: Prior to COVID, it was challenging. Patients often came to appointments with self-diagnoses and information they found online. However, I believe the last three years with COVID have helped healthcare systems regain trust. Our experts provided accurate, impartial information at an uncertain time, repositioning the patient and physician relationship and reestablishing doctors as reliable sources amid the chaos of constantly changing information. That trust and the continuous, end-to-end relationship with patients have become crucial factors in our industry and are something we will continue to lean into to ensure we stay relevant with our patients.

SD: It goes way beyond the physician-patient relationship; it’s the entire 360-degree experience. What challenges do you see in delivering this holistic experience, and how are you addressing them? From a marketing perspective, how are you thinking about these challenges and where do you see opportunity?

KJ: Absolutely. Building strong relationships with patients on both the front end and back end of care is challenging but essential. We’ve made strides, especially with high-acuity patients. However, there’s still a long way to go in terms of price transparency, accessibility, personalized self-service, and meeting consumer expectations.

For me, shifting consumer expectations has redefined my role. I’ve gone from being a Chief Marketing Officer to a Chief Brand Officer and, now more importantly, a Chief Consumer Experience Officer. Understanding and meeting consumer needs and expectations have become paramount. Research shows that an exceptional experience has a higher impact on loyalty and action than the care itself. For example, you may have a world-class cardiovascular program, but as soon as someone realizes they’re at risk for heart disease, they are thinking about how easy it is to get in to see a cardiologist. What’s the wait time? How easy is it for them to receive the next level of care and receive relevant communications? These experiences have become increasingly important as people consider their care options. So, our focus has shifted toward ensuring a seamless experience from awareness to care delivery.

SD: You’ve made a significant shift from patient to consumer. Why was it essential to broaden the frame of reference of who’s walking in those doors or on that telehealth call every day?

KJ: Patient experience is still paramount, but we’ve realized that our patients’ changing expectations, driven by their experiences in other industries, require us to become consumer-first. For years, healthcare has been able to put this on the back burner, but with new entrants entering the space, it’s a critical moment for healthcare systems to rethink how we build loyalty. It’s about creating a meaningful relationship with consumers even before they need care, emphasizing wellness over sickness care. Their expectations have evolved, and we need to adapt accordingly.

SD: I know you’ve worked side-by-side with your CEO; how has the evolution of marketing impacted the growth strategy? How do marketing and long-term strategy work together?

KJ: Our growth strategy is deeply intertwined with everything we do in marketing. I’d say we take a three-pronged approach. We recognize that losing even one patient due to poor experience requires acquiring three new ones to compensate for the lost revenue. Additionally, as we transition into accountable care organizations (ACOs), the continuity of care becomes vital. We aim to keep patients within our system for the entire care journey. Lastly, with cost pressures coming into play across the industry, finding efficiencies that allow us to reinvest in places that our patients are asking for is critical. Marketing plays a pivotal role in facilitating this continuity and efficiency.

SD: In today’s environment, we’re seeing budgets being scrutinized and the need to prove ROI for marketing investments. This leads to a conversation we’ve been having with many CMOs about brand and demand marketing. How do you navigate this constant tension between building reputation and driving demand, especially in times of economic change?

KJ: It’s essential to be agile and adapt to the context. We don’t go all-in on either brand or demand; we continually evaluate the situation. We must understand the economic climate, competitive landscape, and our capacity to deliver on our promises. There is no quicker way to damage your brand if you can’t deliver on your promises. Agility is key to striking the right balance and ensuring we’re meeting patient expectations and delivering value. Something that has enabled this agility is having the right mix of talent on our internal teams to support these moves. Within the digital ecosystem, we must be ready and willing to turn the dial up or down depending on our ability to deliver while also meeting the needs of the business.

SD: Building a modern marketing organization is a challenge for many. How have you approached this, especially in the context of rapidly evolving technologies and consumer expectations?

KJ: We’ve been intentional about modernizing our marketing organization. This includes differentiating and creating a standalone consumer insights department, separating brand and marketing, bringing media buying in-house, and developing in-house creative services. We continuously evaluate our structure and its effectiveness in facilitating collaboration and delivering value to consumers.

SD: Lastly, how are you approaching the use of AI in healthcare marketing? What opportunities and challenges do you foresee in integrating AI into your strategies?

KJ: AI holds immense potential in healthcare marketing, particularly in personalizing content, optimizing search, and enhancing the consumer experience. However, we’re cautious about maintaining trust and credibility. We want to ensure that AI augments our efforts without compromising patient trust. Experimentation and learning from industry best practices will guide our AI integration journey.

About Scott Davis  

Scott is a senior partner and the Chief Growth Officer at Prophet. He brings over 20 years of brand, marketing strategy and new product development experience. Scott speaks at and chairs branding conferences such as The Conference Board and the American Marketing Association and is frequently cited in publications like The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, and Forbes. In addition to helping clients unlock uncommon growth, he is an Adjunct Professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and a guest lecturer at other top graduate schools, including NYU, Harvard, Notre Dame, Medill and Columbia. 

Are you interested in talking with Scott? You can contact him here.

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Generative AI has taken center stage in virtually every business article, LinkedIn post and cocktail party conversation. And for good reason – ChatGPT drove one million users in its first five days, turning the technology into a household name and transforming how businesses think about productivity and efficiency. For marketers getting their heads around it and starting to experiment, the potential can be either daunting or inspiring.  

Marketers have always been at the forefront of technology. AI and machine learning have been critical in shaping programmatic buying, lifecycle marketing and digital experiences. And for many marketers, this isn’t the first shift they’ve experienced within their role. 

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A Framework for Supercharging Your Marketing Efforts With AI  

It’s helpful to think of AI as a tool to help enhance what you do as a marketer, especially when it comes to thinking about customers and their needs. Here are four ways marketers can use AI to show up for their customers in more connected and cohesive ways:  

Unlocking Understanding 

Many AI-driven models excel at analyzing unstructured data, text, images, videos and other content that does not fit neatly into traditional databases. Typically, this type of analysis is time-consuming and expensive, requiring its own algorithms. 

Marketers can use AI to help analyze large volumes of data, recognize complex patterns, explore and visualize data, perform predictive analytics and provide real-time insights to drive more personalized and optimized marketing strategies and tactics.  

Companies like Amazon, Netflix, Meta and Alphabet are far ahead of the curve. But so are non-tech players, such as Johnson & Johnson’s Neutrogena and JP Morgan Chase. All using AI to analyze data and use it in ways that directly benefit customer experience.  

Unlocking Value 

AI automates repetitive and time-consuming processes, reducing the number of daily tasks, and freeing up hours so that marketers can focus on higher-order priorities that require more strategic, human thinking. Smart marketers are learning ways to turn those found hours into new initiatives, liberating marketing teams to find new avenues of growth. 

Adore Me, the e-commerce lingerie company recently acquired by Victoria’s Secret now uses AI to churn out hundreds of product descriptions. While copywriters still need to read, tweak and occasionally edit the blurbs, it estimates it saves up to 40 hours a month per copywriter, with zero impact on sales. Even better? Copywriters hated writing those tedious descriptions. By delegating that work to AI, they can focus on higher-order campaigns that drive additional revenue. 

Unlocking Creativity  

With more marketers being asked to do more with less resources, AI can be an essential tool. It can help reduce the time it takes to generate creative concepts, create visually appealing and engaging content, facilitate brainstorming processes, and draw insights from past campaigns that can help marketers take personalization to the next level for future campaigns.  

Lexus, for instance, used AI to transform its Auto Show experience this year, inviting attendees to enter prompts that quickly personalized their new cars on a 98-inch screen. And political attack ads using AI-created voices of opponents are already reshaping the upcoming election cycle. 

Unlocking Differentiation 

With its speed of processing data, sifting through customer insights and analyzing competitors, AI can suggest gaps in the market to help companies create personalized, innovative and differentiated experiences that cater to specific customer needs. 

For example, Unilever uses AI to explore the human gut, home to trillions of bacteria. Using big-data biology, the company is isolating the microbes with the most calming potential and experimenting with biotech partners to pinpoint food and beverage ingredients that will have the most positive impact on mental well-being. Its Knorr soup division, recently used AI to analyze millions of flavor combinations in days rather than months, using digital modeling to create a zero-salt (but still delicious) soup cube.  

To maximize success with AI it’s important to remember that AI is more useful when it is centered on human needs.  

Creating an AI-Readiness Checklist  

Marketing organizations must also have the necessary data capabilities to implement and operationalize AI effectively. Those include thoughtful attention to:  

Data Foundation: Quality Over Quantity  

Companies must have high-quality, first-party data stored in secure infrastructures with clear, consistent taxonomy that can be processed at a high volume.  

Best Practice: Focusing on securing quality information rather than rushing to get the biggest datasets fast will prevent future inefficiencies and accuracy problems. And despite the focus on large-language models, it’s important to note that many tech companies are experimenting with smaller versions, which may be more accurate and efficient.   

Data Value Exchange: Upping the Ante  

Companies must offer additive products and services for customers in exchange for their data and provide transparency for how data will be used.   

Best Practice: In a world where AI tools are accessible to all, companies can offer trust and respect for privacy as a differentiated yet still personalized experience to customers.   

Data Culture & Fluency: The Heart of AI Transformation   

Companies must pursue broad AI fluency across the whole enterprise as well as invest in specific data and AI expertise to continuously innovate.  

Best Practice: Without the people to understand and strategically use AI at all levels of the organization, companies will not be able to unlock uncommon growth.  

Fully implementing AI will require proper evaluation and tracking against an adoption timeline. As soon as possible, begin incorporating AI into workflows, explore opportunities for sustainable optimization and continue to scale it.   

Coming soon: New AI research from Prophet will help you understand and serve the AI-powered consumer. Subscribe to our mailing list to be among the first to get their hands on these insights!

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Brad Kreiger is the Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Cushman & Wakefield and is responsible for the organization’s global marketing, communications and research functions. Within his role, he focuses on building the brand, demand generation, marketing technology and digital platforms, regional and service line marketing and business development activities, and research and thought leadership.  

Before joining Cushman & Wakefield, Kreiger co-founded Hard Hat Hub, a technology startup that created a digital talent marketplace in construction and facilities management. Prior, he spent a decade as SVP of Marketing at JLL, where he oversaw various corporate communications, marketing and business development functions.  

Scott Davis: Given the disruption and uncertainty we have faced over the last few years, how do you approach both executing your marketing strategy and organizing your marketing team?   

Brad Kreiger: COVID started as a big challenge no one knew how to solve. But at Cushman & Wakefield, we had the expertise and a powerful POV within our industry on how companies should operate relative to the pandemic. Some of that came through our experience during the SARS pandemic because we have a significant presence in China. By the time the pandemic had reached the United States, we were three months ahead of many of our competitors, which allowed us to position Cushman & Wakefield as an industry thought leader. That shift in our positioning positively impacted all of our brand metrics, especially PR.   

We have a senior team of economists and market researchers focusing on creating best-in-class thought leadership. I also have a smart, lean and scrappy corporate marketing team that manages PR and content marketing and also sits alongside the team of market researchers and economists.   

And in this uncertain environment, we are constantly evolving our go-to-market playbook. For example, we recently launched a new campaign called “Behind the Numbers,” which features 90-second Tik-Tok style videos from the perspective of a senior economist who just stepped out of a meeting with a client. We see phenomenal reach with these videos, much more than expected for a B2B organization.  

In addition to experimenting with our go-to-market playbook, we’re also doing a lot to mobilize our content by experimenting, taking risks and modernizing our channel mix. We’re also launching crisp positioning and messaging and trying to implement a  marketing strategy that is more B2C in terms of our message delivery, which has worked well and helped us increase our speed-to-market. My team is concentrating on launching quality and relevant content that helps our corporate and investor clients decide their next move.   

SD: It’s incredible how Cushman & Wakefield has taken major disruptions like the pandemic or the return-to-office debate and has risen as an industry thought leader shaping and directing the narrative around these significant events.  

BK: We’re not afraid to stand up and speak the truth as a brand. We saw a great reaction from our clients and the marketplace, so we continued to double down and go harder, which has become our signature go-to-market strategy. We lead with a strong POV and thought leadership. It’s fantastic when that aligns with us driving more revenue, but it can be even better if it doesn’t because it demonstrates the risk we are willing to take as a brand. That type of risk-taking has helped increase our credibility because we are saying things before our competitors and, therefore, have been early on many industry trends.   

SD: How has the relationship between marketing and sales within your organization shifted due to where you are as an organization? Does that relationship feel different than it did pre-pandemic?   

BK: We have a “we’re in it together mentality” because we’ve had some downturns within the market, which has enabled marketing to take the lead on driving demand. The results of marketing’s demand generation wins in the last few years have proven to our salesforce the importance of our relationship and have helped them see that marketing can do things they cannot do on their own. Additionally, our senior management sees the important link between sales and marketing, which is very different from other B2B organizations.  

SD: What is marketing’s role in shaping the overall corporate strategy for your firm, and how has that changed over the years?  

BK: Our organization is in the process of refreshing our strategic goals and business strategy, and marketing has a seat at the table regarding the overall corporate strategy. I also have a position on our firm’s global management team.  

SD: It’s fascinating to see you play a pivotal role in reimaging what Cushman & Wakefield can become and shift the frame of reference for what this business has been for the last 100 years.   

BK: Over the last eight years, the firm has transformed into a multi-billion-dollar global organization. It’s been an incredible transformation. When I think back on the first campaign I launched here, it was the “Welcome to the new Cushman & Wakefield” campaign. Since then, we’ve launched our environmental, social and governance (ESG) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs. We’ve expanded into growing sectors like multi-family. We’ve matured our operations and reimagined our global infrastructure. As a member of our senior management team, I always ask myself, “Did the brand keep up with the pace of change?” “Does it reflect who we are and what we want to be in a decade?” We continually ask those questions to ensure our brand strategy meets the demands of our clients and market.  

SD: What is your brand and demand mix today, and what will it look like in the future?    

BK: As a B2B sales organization, and in a very competitive industry, demand and sales enablement will always be our heaviest weight in the mix. Call it 70% of what we do. That might tilt a little heavier to brand during down market conditions as we try to leverage our thought leadership across common client challenges. As the industry continues to evolve and consolidate, I think brand will continue to grow in the mix. The trick is ensuring the brand messages speak to the very disparate corners across the industry with consistency and relevance. 

SD: Given the disruption of the last few years, marketers are often asked to take on greater accountability to demonstrate immediate impact and ROI of marketing investment while creating tighter alignment with the business outcomes. Has that been your experience? If so, how have you shifted your strategy to show impact?  

BK: Currently, my team is working on fully automating our digital funnel to get to the point of measuring the critical metrics within each funnel stage. Our team has people sitting across the marketing funnel and within each stage, we identify the critical metrics to determine what conversion means at that stage in the customer journey.   

SD: Many marketing leaders are experimenting with AI within their organizations. Are you incorporating AI into your marketing practices, and if so, what does that look like?   
 

BK: We are running a lot of AI pilots and projects. We aim to use AI to either accelerate our marketing efforts or scale them, depending on our needs. We’re also experimenting with creative development, such as copywriting or graphic design. For example, with the video campaign series “Behind the Numbers,” we are using AI software to help accelerate our video editing capabilities. It’s exciting and we have an incredibly nimble team across the organization on AI right now. 

SD:  It’s evident that AI is enabling your team to be more efficient, but have you experienced any challenges when implementing AI to drive efficiency and if so how did you overcome them?  

BK:  I feel lucky that our firm has had an AI-backed transformation team now for several years. That’s helped my leadership overcome some of the early challenges around understanding what automation can do. It’s taken some of the fear out of the process. Now that we’re introducing generative AI into our marketing content processes, the challenges are really about training and scaling the process. Which means having strong change management partners. We measure the success based on typical efficiency metrics around shortening processes, but also on quality. Both are critical. I think AI is a means to an end, but you shouldn’t lose focus on the big-picture success metrics of the marketing program. 

SD: How will AI transform marketing in the next few years?   

BK: Big question. It will likely change the entire way the web works and ‘digital marketing’ around it. It might allow us to leapfrog clunky tech development and focus more on connecting data sets. And it should allow us to be more creative. That might sound counterintuitive, but if you think about the energy it takes to generate one creative idea today, we may be able to come up with 50 concepts in the same amount of time. Add that to reducing all the administrative tasks,  what’s left are creative, passionate marketers who know their customers and can use their experience to evaluate the best ways to get messages to market. It’s going to be exciting. 

SD: What advice do you have for marketing leaders and CMOs navigating the uncertainty of the next few years?  

BK: Leading the marketing function is not for the faint of heart. You have to be ready to react to what’s happening and make decisions fast. The world has gotten very complicated, yet organizations are facing pressure to grow at the same pace as when the world was less volatile. All of this is making it even more complicated than ever to get your message out, which is why great marketing leaders listen more than they talk and are aware of their audience and how they make decisions. If you are an old-school leader who thinks that pretty and shiny ads will beat people down with your message, you will not succeed. In this market, you need to meet people where they are and understand how your product and brand need to evolve.  

About Scott Davis  

Scott is a senior partner and the Chief Growth Officer at Prophet. He brings over 20 years of brand, marketing strategy and new product development experience. Scott speaks at and chairs branding conferences such as The Conference Board and the American Marketing Association and is frequently cited in publications like The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, and Forbes. In addition to helping clients unlock uncommon growth, he is an Adjunct Professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and a guest lecturer at other top graduate schools, including NYU, Harvard, Notre Dame, Medill and Columbia. 

Are you interested in talking with Scott? You can contact him here.

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Ask any marketer, and they’ll tell you that 2023 has been a year of budget cuts and canceled launches. According to Gartner’s CMO Spend and Strategy 2023 Survey, 75% of senior marketers reported being asked to do more with less. As budgets decrease, marketing expectations significantly increase, with 86% of surveyed senior marketers agreeing their organization must undergo significant changes in how they work to achieve their goals.   

Right now, that near-universal do more with less directive is an especially bitter pill. Marketers still have whiplash from the last few years, with some businesses seeing massive contraction during the pandemic and others experiencing dizzying growth, resulting in competing interests between brand and demand. Many hoped for at least a glimmer of normalcy.   

Between inflation and rising interest rates, the likelihood of a recession has become a daily odds-making game for economists. The risk is falling. Yet many, including CEOs, investors, legislators and consumers, are already entrenched in a `vibecession.’ They feel things are bad, even if economic indicators don’t support that view. In conjunction with the disruption of the last few years, it has become almost impossible for marketers to rely on historical planning processes and requires them to maximize flexibility, even as budgets and resources diminish.   

This uncertainty isn’t necessarily bad news for the creative and agile marketer. After all, disciplined belt-tightening can allow marketing leaders to reflect, establish new ways of working, and find creative ways to deliver maximum value with their current resources.   

As marketers look to close the year strong and head into 2024 planning, we’ve identified seven critical steps marketing organizations should take to strategically balance and blend brand and demand marketing agendas and inform next year’s planning efforts that are fast upon us. 

1. Translate Business Objectives Into Quantified Customer Goals  

The first and most important part of doing more with less is to remain diligent in driving business outcomes with a customer-focused lens. All activity should point directly at delivering business value for the short and long term. Ensuring you have customer-focused goals based on acquisition, retention, cross-sell and upsell and making your brand worth paying more for is the foundation to maximize resources.   

Once you have set your goals, you must regularly track and align your efforts to the business outcomes your organization expects marketing to influence or drive. To do this, we recommend developing a leading and lagging metrics ladder and establishing quarterly check-ins with your team. By doing so, you will know what is working in your marketing plan and feel more confident that every element of your marketing budget is maximized and driving ROI. And if you notice that marketing efforts are underperforming, you’ll be in a better position to quickly pivot your efforts.  

Learn more on how you can anchor your marketing activities and investments in business outcomes in our global research report, Brand and Demand: A Love Story.  

2. Do Fewer Things 

Peter Drucker famously wrote, “Management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right things.” The same is true with marketers. Every dollar works as hard as possible, but the success of your budget is dependent on whether you invested those dollars appropriately, which is why marketing leaders need to prioritize growth opportunities and continuously analyze and optimize to ensure those efforts are practical and efficient.  

Obvious, right? But in a world where specialists and digital marketing skills are at a premium, many companies are overspending to build executional muscle in modern marketing tactics. But while they are actively improving their search and social skills, for example, they may lose focus on why they are in those channels in the first place. 

Companies can do more things right by doing fewer things and staying laser-focused on driving business outcomes and customer goals. Before greenlighting any initiative, even small ones, you must ensure they support those goals. When calculating the cost of your marketing efforts, measuring the cost in dollars and the resources and time your team needs to invest in executing is critical.   

Here are some key questions to help marketers prune the marketing calendar. If you’re feeling advanced, you can build a scoring system to help you prioritize.  

3. Prioritize Moments That Matter Most in Your Customer’s Journey 

As our Brand and Demand: A Love Story report noted, journey-based planning has become critical in the digitally driven marketers’ toolbox. However, as marketers adopt this concept, many need to work harder to make the most out of every moment in the journey, which spreads resources too thin and splinters impact.   

Studying the journey keeps organizations customer-centric and uncovers opportunities. But to maximize usefulness, marketers must decide on the most critical barriers to address and seize opportunities to build out the signature and memorable moments. 

Prioritizing the moments that matter the most in the customer journey calls for tough choices, especially when you need to do more with less. Marketing leaders prioritizing customer acquisition will likely lean toward awareness and consideration moments, while those focused on retention and loyalty will probably lean toward post-purchase moments. One thing to note when prioritizing these moments is to make a list of those that you are choosing to ignore now. Eventually, marketing budgets will increase again, and the moments you deprioritize can be revisited.   

Once you have prioritized your moments, you must ensure your teams leverage these moments for brand and demand opportunities. After all, doing more with less is sometimes doing two things simultaneously! By doing so, it will be easier for your team to make the right choices about the appropriate channels, experiences and messages you need to serve your customers and, at the right time, to drive results for your organization. 

4. Sharpen Your Value Propositions- Superiority That Matters 

To stay relentlessly relevant and earn customer respect and loyalty, strong brands must deliver meaningful, purposeful connections that appeal to people’s emotions with distinctive brand Purpose, Promise and Principles. At this point, many brands clearly understand why they exist and what they do. Still, in this low-spending climate, where every dollar counts, brands should revisit how they think about functional benefits, quality and superiority claims.  

When budgets and resources are constrained, it is a best practice to revise and sharpen your demand-based value proposition at the umbrella brand and product level, ensuring that product-level promises are crisp, compelling and competitive.  And, even more than that, based on things that your target audience can experience. Superiority in the lab or around the margins is one thing, but superiority that people can see and feel, that makes a real difference is another thing. Weaving those promises to reinforce and inform the brand story, and vice versa and ensuring that they are reflected across all in-market executions can boost short-term revenues, even as they support long-term brand health.   

Revisiting your value proposition may mean returning to tried and true basics while challenging assumptions within your organization. It can also result in your team reconsidering old-fashioned benefits and features to sharpen your customer value story, which should evolve and grow as your customer needs change. 

As you do so you should think through these critical questions: 

1. What are the specific tensions, meaningful benefit pillars and proof points that are critical to deliver on the brand promise?  
2. Do these need to change for different customer audiences?  
3. How can we uniquely deliver superiority that matters to customers?  
4. Are our proof points ownable and tangible?
5. Are the brand and demand value stories tightly interwoven? 
6. How can you test and learn before market scaling? 

5. Give Your Creative Assets a Make-over  

In recent years, much of the focus for marketers has been on where and how communications are delivered. It’s impressive how far many have come as they build expertise in performance marketing, owned and earned media, SEO and SEM.   

But many people forget that data shows the success of a campaign is dependent on the quality of the creative. Brilliant campaign ideas and breakthrough experiences are a must-have. Creative work at every point in the journey needs to be branded and rooted in demand-based product truths. It’s not enough to love an asset on the drawing board. It has to stand out in the specific context in which people will discover it. 

During times when you need to do more with less, it’s a good step to build upon your basics. Below is a sampling of a few ways you can do this: 

• Add more demand marketing strategies to your top-of-funnel efforts. 
• Dial up your brand messaging during the purchasing stage of your customer’s journey.  
• Sweat your call to action (CTA). You should vet and optimize your CTAs, even if you’ve used them a million times.  
• Ensure every experience and touchpoint leads your customers to the next milestone in their journey and propels them to the conversion and loyalty stages.  

On a side note, many marketers are integrating AI into their creative process to drive efficiency in their process and execution. We will touch on this more below. 

6. Leverage AI to Do More With Less

AI and machine learning, have played a critical role for marketers for several years. After all, both power programmatic buying, personalized messaging, predictive analytics, buy-now recommendations and chatbots.   

But, with the recent rise of ChatGPT and generative AI tools, businesses have begun experimenting with new ways to increase productivity and effectiveness. It’s becoming clear that the marketing teams that leverage AI tools can magically add more hours to their days.   

While we are at the beginning stages of this new evolution of generative AI, we have identified four key areas of AI that can help support your marketing efforts and teams today. 

AI is evolving fast, and marketers must remember that what they learned last week is outdated. Yet even in its infancy, it has the potential to save money, free up hundreds of hours and improve effectiveness. 

7. Elevate Scenario Planning  

It sometimes feels like we are working in patchy fog. Will the “vibecession” give way to a real one? Will do more with less  be the bumper sticker for just a few more quarters or the foreseeable future? No one knows. But effective scenario planning can mean the difference between simply surviving unexpected curveballs or thriving because of them. It’s the difference between mourning and moving.  

People often think of scenario planning as dealing with the long-term future for outcomes that are years away. But why not use it for the near term to proactively address scenarios that may jeopardize the ability to reach any prioritized goal? It can even be used at the level of an individual initiative to ensure quick response to in-market performance.  

Think of scenario planning as a game. A game board like the one below can be used to help with thinking ahead on owned-asset performance. We recommend building a cross-disciplinary team to scenario plan for your next launch, campaign or initiative. You can use this gameboard to strategize how you might react to potential scenarios, such as shifting media spending, changing messaging or revisiting content and social strategies.   

From there, teams can think about how best to codify and socialize the contingency plans, including the owners of levers. 

The job isn’t over when the game board is completed. Identifying when, how and who is responsible for tracking and implementing is critical. Additional cross-functional planning sessions can allow follow-up on hot topics and assign owners to chosen levers.   

Learn more about scenario planning in our recent AMA article. 

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Amy Scissons is the Chief Marketing and Communications officer at Russell Reynolds Associates, overseeing global marketing and communications for the leading executive search and leadership advisory firm.  

Scissons previously was at Mercer, where she served as Chief Marketing Officer and led marketing operations in more than 100 cities and 41 countries for the global human resources consulting firm. She brings over 20 years of experience across several industries and global markets. Scissons specializes in integrated marketing, demand generation, customer-centric digital and data-driven marketing and leading high-performance teams.  

Mat Zucker: Given the disruption of the last few years, marketers are often being asked to take on greater accountability to demonstrate immediate impact and ROI of marketing investment while creating tighter alignment with the business outcomes. Has that been your experience? If so, how have you shifted your strategy to show impact? 

Amy Scissons: The expectations around marketing delivered ROI have evolved since taking the role. Previously, this role was focused on communications and driving colleague engagement, but now it’s shifted to driving topline growth for the firm while carving out greater differentiation within the market. In particular, professional services and leadership advisory is a relatively homogeneous marketplace as we deliver similar services to our competitors. Differentiation is key to ensuring we continue to win in the market.  

To measure our impact, we look at marketing-attributed revenue, particularly inbound leads driven by digital or other channels. We also look at how effectively we sell differentiated service bundles tied to our client needs. To measure the success of our business development enablement, we look at win rates and the service portfolio’s overall growth.  

MZ: Within your organization, how do you partner with other internal business units and teams to unlock new opportunities for driving growth? Has this evolved in recent years?   

AS: Growth opportunities are a shared responsibility among business development, strategy and marketing. For example, our strategy team will identify organic growth opportunities. At the same time, our client-facing colleagues will highlight new business challenges our clients face, while marketing will use data and digital to identify new growth opportunities based on engagement. We collectively evaluate them as an organization and action them accordingly.  

MZ: Last year, we published a report, “Brand and Demand Marketing: A Love Story,” which speaks to the tensions between brand and demand marketing and why working in silos harms performance. Both are critical functions that need to work together to enable success. How do you balance brand and demand within your marketing organization?  

AS: Within our marketing and communications organization, we made a significant shift to our operating model and chose to build out more specialized roles within the team. This shift has changed how we can execute and the speed at which we can deliver. As a result, we are becoming much more creative in presenting our insights and data, which gives executives ways to interact with our insights and take them to the boardroom. For example, we may not always win the thought leadership topic game, but we can win on how we deliver our thought leadership. By shifting how the team is structured, we’ve become more agile, allowing us to do some brand, demand, and business development enablement work.  

 MZ: Now that you have this new operating model in place, are people still wired in the old way, hybrid, or have they fully embraced this new way of working? 

AS: Yes, we have adapted nicely to the new way of working, though it took time to map out workflows and ensure team members trust one another to deliver their part of the work. The briefing process is key every time we take on a new project. We establish the “why” of our project and challenge ourselves to think of creative ways to deliver the work.   

MZ: What kind of feedback do you get from your people regarding their careers and where they are in their journey? 

AS: We are a relatively new team. We are in our second full year as a fully formed marketing leadership team. We are all excited about the work we are doing. I give my team a lot of autonomy and space to innovate. Some of them are interested in AI, so they have dedicated time to play around with these tools. With AI, I’ve told them first to find a really small way to use it so that they can show the organization that we are thinking about it. The team quickly came up with the idea to build screensavers with our logo using AI, and now our consultants have this up on their desktops. Little things like that help build energy around innovation and move the organization forward, which excites the team. It feels like a small thing, but it gives people permission to experiment.  

MZ: Our research found that experimentation and a test-and-learn mindset are not nice to have but a must-have because if you only use benchmarks to measure success, you will fail. How does this concept sit with you? 

AS: I 100% agree. We do things we would never think to invest in as experiments and are always surprised to see the growth and opportunities that emerge. For instance, our Redefiners  podcast has been incredibly successful, but we did not predict that would be the case. I never thought we would see 25,000 downloads per episode in the first or third season. And because of this test, our podcast has become a successful investment in the Russell Reynolds Associates brand and is now a fully operational demand-generation tool.  

Test and learn is built into how we work. Some tests did not perform that well. For example, we thought this really cool digital pitch tool would completely change our win rate, but it didn’t, so we pivoted and killed it quickly.  

MZ: What big takeaway do you want to share with other CMOs and marketing leaders?  

AS: Creating an environment and a team that can be very agile is incredibly important, but you need to make sure you also have the right technology to support it. After all, much of your budget goes to your marketing technology stack. Having the right operating model is also important. You need to create a model that enables your marketers to work and act differently and not get stuck in the ways of working that are not working. It’s essential to challenge the organization, innovate, do things competitors aren’t doing and let ideas come from everywhere. Because my team is so agile, we can act on and respond to new ideas and bring them to market faster. 

MZ: What are the biggest challenges you believe other CMOs and marketing leaders face today and will continue to face in the next few years? 

AS: I am convinced that marketing is going through a massive disruption. AI will transform marketing, and the marketers who understand how to use AI, develop prompts and put them in workflows will see a lot of success. The challenge with the CMO role is that it is very broad and has high expectations. You only have a little time to think, transform, and drive change. But the CMOs and marketing leaders who figure out how to use AI in their workflows will be more productive and thrive.  

About Mat Zucker 

Mat is a senior partner and co-lead of Prophet’s Marketing and Sales practice. He helps clients transform digitally, finding new areas of growth in marketing, content and communications. Previously, Mat was the Global Executive Creative Director at Razorfish, served as Chief Creative Officer at OgilvyOne New York and held leadership roles at R/GA and Agency.com. In addition to helping clients creatively connect and engage with their customers, he hosts two podcasts, Cidiot and Rising.   

Are you interested in talking with Mat? You can contact him, here. 

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Chiaki Nishino: Given the disruption of the last few years, marketers are often asked to take on greater accountability to demonstrate immediate impact and ROI of marketing investment while creating tighter alignment with the business outcomes. Has that been your experience? If so, how have you shifted your strategy to show impact?  

Theresa McLaughlin: It is a very interesting time to be the global head of marketing especially when considering the evolution of digital transformation. When I was at TD Bank Group, the organization’s investment in third-party digital increased from 5% to 50%. Now it’s shifted to first-party digital investments.  

When the digital transformation first began, it wasn’t about brand storytelling but performance marketing. It quickly became a competition of performance marketing versus brand marketing. And that probably needed to swing in this direction to ensure there was a return with performance marketing investments.  

But when COVID hit, the proliferation of content in the media became intense, and organizations needed to shift to build more authenticity.  

Given all I have seen, I’m a big believer in brand and demand. I want to ensure that my budget in brand, individual business unit marketing and incremental campaign budgets are all looked at through an integrated model of brand and demand. Ultimately, I want to drive the brand into the product experience and the performance marketing strategy.  

CN: How have conversations with your C-suite and board changed as you take on new accountability in driving and proving business value?   

TM: There absolutely is pressure to demonstrate ROI, but as the global head of marketing, my job is to lean into storytelling. For example, we pull together the story and data in the right way, to show how we are influencing the full-funnel experience for our target audience and clients.   

When communicating the brand investment, I lean into classic upper and lower funnel brand metrics, but brand is about what clients say it is, not what we tell them. Therefore, metrics like NPS really matter when talking about the brand experience. I expect tough questions from across the executive team, so I lean into data to tell the story that proves marketing’s ROI. What got us here is not going to get us there, which is why we are making the case for brand investment. 

CN. How do you partner with other internal business units and teams to unlock new opportunities for driving growth, and how has this evolved in recent years?   

TM: T. Rowe Price is a global organization, so sitting within that global distribution organization is essential.   

When partnering with my sales organization, I’ll start by standing up with the sales management team and collaborating on initiatives such as lead management, product marketing and positioning, and RFP management as just a few examples. Cross-functional leadership is crucial not just for marketing but to deliver better business outcomes that truly meet the needs of our customers.  

CN: In our research, we found that effective marketers work to build modern marketing organizations and experiment to win. Do you have any examples you can share where you’ve been able to implement these two principles effectively?   

TM: At T. Rowe Price, every part of marketing is in a constant state of transformation, which is why the principle “experiment to win” resonates with me. We have many opportunities and playgrounds where we can test and learn new strategies and techniques, and our team’s new talent has upgraded our approach to experimentation.   

In terms of building a modern marketing organization, getting your operating model is critical. It is vital to take an integrated approach to the operating model. This is why it’s crucial to be a “T-shaped marketer” who can play a more fluid and integrated role within your organization. To build an integrated marketing org, about two-thirds of our team sit in the center, but a third sits in the business, so we avoid operating in silos and get greater connection points to move our marketing agenda forward with the buy-in from other functional leads.  

In my role, I often see myself as more than just the global head of marketing.  In addition to being responsible for marketing, I need to think about CX, talent, digital, sales, and lead generation – it’s true capital marketing. My role is often that of an integrator, and to do that successfully, I need to convince other functional leads – who aren’t marketers — to find points of collaboration. I often approach this like I would a marketing campaign. It’s all about creating seamless experiences that put the customer at the center of everything we do. 

About Chiaki Nishino  

Chiaki Nishino is Prophet’s president and a member of the organization’s Executive Committee and Board of Directors. In addition to leading Prophet’s North American business strategy, she oversees the organization’s global Women in Leadership and Diversity efforts. She brings extensive experience in growth strategy, customer experience, brand strategy and marketing. She’s led clients in financial services, communication and healthcare to new avenues of expansion. And she’s an industry leader in customer engagement and marketing accountability, having spoken at the Conference Board and the Association of National Advertisers. Before joining Prophet, Chiaki was a Partner at Lippincott Mercer, and worked at Mercer Management Consulting and Dell Computers. Are you interested in talking to Chiaki? You can contact her here.

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For consumer brands, China remains one of the most attractive lands of opportunities, despite the disruption from the pandemic. The rise of a huge middle class with enormous spending power makes the market a must-win, but not necessarily an easy one. Different generations of consumers are developing vastly diverse lifestyles, needs and preferences, and competition between local and international, startup and traditional companies is increasingly intense. Regional differences require highly nuanced go-to-market strategies beyond adapting to the local digital ecosystems.   

To navigate this environment effectively, companies need to answer two fundamental questions: Where should they play to unlock growth? And how can they win with differentiated and relevant value propositions? These seemingly straightforward questions can be daunting as they require careful and holistic considerations regarding the entire business – how to structurally define consumer opportunities with so many forces and fast-moving trends at play? How to drive organizational alignment around key growth spaces? How to develop a high-level strategy with concrete actions across brand, product and channel execution? 

Introducing Demand-to-Growth Landscape 

At Prophet, we partner with leading consumer brands to answer these strategic questions through a comprehensive analytic method called the Demand-to-Growth Landscape. In a nutshell, Demand-to-Growth Landscape is a systematic study that examines the key dimensions (e.g., consumer segments, consumption occasions, etc.) influencing consumer demand for a certain category. By drawing a map with these dimensions, we define and synthesize consumer growth spaces, and thus blend value lenses and consumer lenses to decode each opportunity.   

There is no one universal formula for how companies should utilize the Demand-to-Growth Landscape. However, those that succeed often follow three best practices. 

1. Customize the map.

Although consumer segments and consumption occasions are commonly used, particularly by companies in the consumer packaged goods category as key dimensions to build the Demand-to-Growth Landscape, companies have to think through what works best for their category and the intended usage of the tool. For instance, price tier can be applied as a dimension for the fashion category as it’s often a key factor in consumers’ purchasing decisions. 

2. Enrich with human insights.

While the quantitative study is helpful for identifying and profiling growth spaces, companies will benefit from deep listening to gain a thorough understanding of their consumers’ motivations and experiences to inspire actions. 

3. Create and sustain competitive superiority.

Once companies have decided which growth spaces to focus on, they have to build a competitive advantage. They can learn from the Superiority Model, initially developed by P&G, to define the most critical levers for their category, and be diligent in applying the framework to guide actions and track results.   

Source: Proctor & Gamble

How Your Company Should Utilize the Demand-to-Growth Landscape for Different Strategic Objectives 

The Demand-to-Growth Landscape can help inform strategic decisions across portfolio, brand and product levels. Below, we outline three tried-and-true applications of the approach, each with a client story to illustrate how it can positively impact the business. 

Develop Brand Portfolio Strategy  

Demand-to-Growth Landscape provides foundational insights for developing a brand portfolio strategy. Leaders who oversee large portfolios should ask: 

• Which are the growth spaces to prioritize?  
• How many brands are required to win these spaces?  
• What is the role of each brand?  
• Is there any opportunity to rationalize the portfolio or tap into white space?  

Our work with sportswear and lifestyle group 

Our client is a global leader in sports and lifestyle products with a diverse range of apparel, footwear, accessories, and equipment. Its business needed to scale but was facing difficulty, as several of its brands were playing on top of each other.  

Source: Unsplash

Prophet was engaged to help the client gain a better understanding of its key global markets, including China and the US, and provide strategic recommendations for go-to-market actions. We started by uncovering eight consumer segments, which were prioritized based on spending power, category engagement and brand perceptions. We then built a Demand-to-Growth Landscape based on these consumer segments and occasions, highlighting growth spaces to expand the business with the current portfolio of brands. To tease apart the individual brands’ growth strategies, Prophet defined clear swim lanes on the landscape, aligning on “centers of gravity” for each brand to prioritize investment and brand building.  

Define Brand Target and Positioning 

Demand-to-Growth Landscape offers critical consumer insights to help inspire a unique brand positioning. CMOs seeking to elevate their brands should ask:  

• Who are the consumers in the target growth space?  
• What do these consumers need the most, and how can my brand connect with them?  
• What are the functional benefits required to support the emotional value?  

Our work with a leading CPG company 

Our client, a global food and beverage giant, sought our expertise to help reposition one of its key brands following a successful collaboration on its China brand portfolio strategy. In recent years, the brand has become staler, facing challenges in attracting young consumers.  

Source: Unsplash

To reinforce the brand strategy, we thoroughly examined the previously established Demand-to-Growth Landscape data in order to identify the most critical consumers within the brand’s target growth space. We delved into demographics, including age group and city tier, as well as their life motivations and category attitudes and behaviors. Additionally, we conducted deep listening research to capture micro-stories that brought the brand muse to life. Leveraging these insights, we identified a potent brand positioning territory that deeply resonated with the younger generation’s yearning for genuine connections, especially within the home environment following the pandemic. 

Identify Product Portfolio Opportunities 

By combining Demand-to-Growth Landscape with Superiority assessment, businesses can gain valuable insights to uncover product opportunities. Marketers who own a vast product portfolio should ask: 

• Where does the brand have potential product gaps on the demand landscape? 
• Where do the brand’s existing products fall short compared to competitors? 
• Where does the brand have competitive products but need to improve its messaging or product availability? 

Our work with a leading apparel company 

Prophet was appointed by a leading apparel and footwear company to accelerate its transformation from a product-driven to a consumer-centric approach to its brand strategy in China. The company had diverse products, each with functional benefits, however, they often overlapped and lacked a distinctive focus in messaging.  

Source: Unsplash

Through the Demand-to-Growth Landscape approach, we delineated each growth space based on opportunity size, price tier, consumer profile and goals, and desired product drivers. Subsequently, we collaborated with the client’s product experts to objectively map their product portfolio and those of key competitors onto the landscape, conducting a thorough Superiority assessment. This exercise enabled the client’s senior leadership team to achieve alignment and make commitments to a series of product growth initiatives, bringing confidence to revitalize their growth momentum. 

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In 2022, companies faced rising costs, continued supply chain challenges, and lasting COVID repercussions, especially with Asia’s more cautious reopening. Despite these challenges, brands found novel ways to adapt to rising trends; creating new products and experiences to surprise and delight their consumers. They reimagined offline experiences, ventured into the Metaverse, and redefined standards for ESG.  

Looking ahead to 2023, we foresee continued pressure for businesses and marketers to perform in the face of sustained uncertainties. But we also see more opportunities for brands to rethink their offerings, double down on customer centricity, and build relevance that lasts – for customers and employees alike. 

Below, we share our thoughts on five trends for marketers to keep in mind as we head into 2023. 

1. Expanding the Scope of the CMO 

The role of the CMO and their team will continue to shift as marketing evolves from a predominantly creative function to an increasingly data-driven one. Effective marketing now requires an increased focus on data-driven decision-making, using analytics and insights to understand customer needs and preferences to develop targeted campaigns that reach the right audience at the right time.  

The proliferation of new technologies has opened up a wide range of opportunities and challenges for marketers. However, to gain the lead, marketers must hone their skill sets and strengthen their analytical wheelhouse as their MarTech stack is growing ever larger and more complex.  

With this expanded remit also comes the need for even closer collaboration between marketing and other departments within the organization. For Matt Che, CMO of Budweiser APAC, a close partnership with the commercial team has been critical to the company’s success in Asia: “It’s important to align across marketing and sales teams on what long-term success looks like as well as what challenges might arise in the short term. Collaborating with sales allows us to better identify commercial realities such as pricing, competition, and potential cannibalization within our portfolio.”  

As brands continue pushing for customer-centricity, marketing can continue to elevate the voice of the customer across all areas of the business to drive uncommon growth. 

2. Building Purpose-Led Brands 

Across all industries, a commitment to ESG is becoming expected, if not demanded, by stakeholders. Consumers, employees, and investors are coming from all angles to hold companies to higher standards, expecting not simply a verbal commitment to ESG but tangible policies and practices that reflect these values. Consumers are increasingly choosing companies that take a stand on issues they care about, with 86% expecting CEOs to speak out on societal issues, according to Edelman. Internally, employees are seeking employers who align with their values, and investors are putting record-breaking amounts of capital behind companies prioritizing ESG. More than ever, marketers must strive to build purpose-led brands that translate aspirational visions into pragmatic strategies that contribute to a more sustainable future. 

As an early adopter of sustainable product design and supply chain management, consumer electronics leader ASUS has long been a champion of ESG principles. To further solidify its leadership in this area, the company had been exploring how to make ESG not just an initiative, but a central pillar of future strategic growth. Prophet was tasked with turning ASUS’s ESG strategy into a narrative that could be communicated to both internal and external stakeholders. Our team delivered a comprehensive ESG brand strategy that included a messaging framework, activation ideas, and creative assets to bring the ESG strategy to life, allowing the brand to socialize its core principles effectively and ensure cohesion with the overall brand strategy across both internal and external stakeholders. This ESG strategy was officially launched in the recent ASUS CES 2023 launch event. 

3. Deepening Post-Purchase Experiences 

As marketers are well aware, the customer journey does not end when a purchase is made. To adapt a true customer-centric mindset, brands must not only convince consumers to choose them, but also pay attention to how their customers use their product or service. As customer acquisition costs continue to rise and channel fragmentation intensifies, customer retainment has become an increasingly important growth driver for brands. Holistic customer experience, particularly when it comes to post-purchase engagement, must not be overlooked. In Southeast Asia, nearly 90% of consumers were more enticed to shop somewhere with a loyalty program. In China, we’ve seen an opportunity gap for marketers to focus more on customer lifetime value to find more sustainable and long-term growth, based on findings from Prophet’s latest research “Brand and Demand Marketing: A Love Story.”  

Many leading brands have started taking steps. Outdoor apparel company, The North Face, wanted to redefine how to deliver its XPLR Pass loyalty program in Greater China to drive higher engagement with Chinese members. The company saw an opportunity to expand the types of benefits provided, going beyond solely monetary rewards to better reflect the brand DNA and further differentiate itself from competitors. As part of the Greater China loyalty program revamp, Prophet developed a unique positioning for XPLR Pass and defined key strategic metrics, data strategy and engagement tactics. This work sets the foundation for the revamped loyalty program to be a key pillar of future growth for the brand in that market. 

4. Meeting Customer Needs Through Demand Landscape Mapping 

Consumers today have access to more information at their fingertips than ever before, making them increasingly sophisticated and discerning shoppers across all categories. As a result, customer segments are becoming more diverse and complex as well, with more variance in mindsets and behaviors. For instance, Asia consumers tend not to be pure luxury shoppers, with 82% of Korean respondents and 72% of Chinese respondents stating that they like to mix and match across premium and mass brands. To develop a brand and product portfolio to meet the nuanced needs of their target audience, brands can leverage demand landscape mapping to understand both where to play and how to win. 

Prophet worked with a leading beverage company to develop its China portfolio strategy based on demand landscape. The company had several local and global brands in the market but wanted to more clearly define the roles of key brands and their anchored demand spaces. By combining quantitative data analysis with strategic insights, Prophet mapped its existing brands to high-value demand opportunities – i.e., specific consumer segment, occasion and drinking needs, as well as identifying key whitespace opportunities for innovation. We further developed clear portraits of priority consumer segments, including holistic understanding of their social context, personal motivations, and lifestyle, enabling the company to better activate the portfolio and brand strategies.  

5. Driving Growth From Within Through Cultural Transformation  

As mentioned previously, workers are increasingly making it a priority to choose an employer that aligns with their values. Organizations know the importance of developing internal branding and communications that are consistent with the external brand, but there’s more work to be done. By taking steps to actively understand and address the needs of their workforce, companies can drive cultural transformation from within. Engaged employees are more likely to be productive, innovative, and collaborative: Within the same organization, highly engaged business units can result in a 23% difference in profitability. In East Asia especially, only 17% of employees report feeling engaged at work (compared with 21% globally) highlighting an opportunity for firms to look inward and close the gap. Whether it’s revamping the company’s values, investing in employee learning and development or driving better collaboration, an engaged workforce is the fuel for a brand’s growth engine. 

Polestar, an electric performance car brand, had aggressive global growth aspirations, with plans to add 50 new spaces and over 700 new employees. With this rapid expansion in mind, ensuring that customer-facing staff were equipped to deliver a consistent customer experience was key. Polestar tasked Prophet with developing a clear customer experience strategy that covered recruitment, training, service, and operations. Prophet created a training curriculum, including eLearning modules, live training events, and self-study exercises, which covered how to tell the brand story, how to respond to customer scenarios, and role-specific guidelines. Prophet’s successful training program resulted in high participation and engagement rates, equipping and enabling customer-facing teams at Polestar to deliver a consistent and differentiated customer experience. 

This article was originally published on MARKETING-INTERACTIVE. 

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Whether the economy is heading toward a recession (or already in one), chief marketing officers know their budgets are under intense scrutiny. Our work with CMOs around the world reveals that the most successful marketing execs aren’t just defending budgets. They’re also meeting this moment with new ways of making marketing more effective, translating their efforts into terms and metrics better understood throughout the organization. They’re integrating marketing into more functions. And they’re adapting new languages to drive uncommon growth and business impact through the economic fog. 

In recent conversations with CMOs, we found some common threads on how they are having conversations with their executive teams and driving impact for their organizations. Here are three trends we expect to see more of, especially as the prospect of economic uncertainty means more scrutiny on every marketing investment.  

CMO’s Are Learning One Another’s Love Language 

Okay, it’s not the love languages from those internet quizzes. There are no acts of service, quality time or physical touch. But marketers are finding ways to balance their demand and brand marketing efforts while applying it to business outcomes. The most successful marketing organizations have turned brand and demand, often an antagonistic relationship, into the ultimate power couple.  

Prophet’s recent report shows how they’ve overcome residual antagonism. They are building novel bridges between brand, to drive awareness and build equity and demand or performance marketing, to drive immediate conversion. And in doing so, they’re tapping new growth opportunities. 

Our research finds that the most successful marketers map their brand and demand marketing objectives against shared business outcomes. They integrate planning cycles and share capabilities across brand and demand to maximize marketing budgets over the entire customer journey. They don’t pick between brand or demand. They ensure the two approaches work in concert to deliver shared outcomes. 

Integrating brand campaigns more tightly into the demand function is a good way for marketers to have their cake and eat it too. Aligning brand with demand allows marketers to demonstrate ROI to the C-Suite while also delivering against both functions. 

For those from the brand side, a different vocabulary is required, as marketing is increasingly seen as a revenue driver–not a cost center. Successful marketers are learning the language of the boardroom. They’ve got to replace words like funnels, impressions or brand value with the language of ROI. And it means using proof of impact that meets the C-suite acid test for business impact: Did it increase revenue or not? 

Saying “No” Will Become More Powerful in the Next Planning Cycle 

The current inflationary pressure means marketers have to say “no” more often.  

But rather than feeling discouraged by having to do so, many say they are learning to enjoy that little word more than they expected. It’s empowering them to mothball tactics without proven ROI. And it’s giving them more authority to demand results from their teams and channel partners. By turning thumbs down on the many small investments brands typically make just to “have a presence” or “keep an oar in,” they tell us they’re focusing on the most proven channels. They’re not abandoning the small strategic bets needed to keep their test-and-learn culture thriving, but they are becoming more disciplined about how they are funded. 

CMO’s Are Becoming Integrators Across Many Functional Areas 

Just as they are coming together to integrate their brand and demand functions to unite around a unified business objective, CMOs are emerging as integrators across different functions. That could mean working closely with human resources and developing an employee value proposition for recruiting or it means recognizing that marketing can–and should–take a leadership role in integrations to build organizational culture. 

Breaking down silos is hard work and requires an integrated marketer to lead the charge. The individual filling this role should be a more seasoned marketing professional with the ability to work cross-functionally. And they must be willing to roll up their sleeves and get into the nooks and crannies of the business, immersing themselves in the customer journey in new and different ways. Marketing leaders should be looking to build proactive connections with their colleagues across human resources, product, sales and IT to deliver cross-functional business impact. This integrator mindset will allow them to not only work in lockstep with other business units but if done well, help to uncover untapped pockets of demand.  

Integrating multiple brands and teams requires a cross-functional marketing technology stack, of course. But genuine integration requires a deeper commitment. Many companies have charged people throughout the marketing organization with specific responsibilities to make sure plans are holistic and well-integrated. Others rely on integrative processes, constantly organizing new pods and tiger teams to solve challenges. 

Putting Your New Love Language Into Practice 

For many, the annual planning season is either underway or right around the corner. This is a great reminder to be mindful and refine the language you are using as a marketing leader.  In a recent blog, we wrote about how to modernize the marketing planning cycle. Some questions to consider as you reimagine your approach to your annual marketing plans:   

• What are the business objectives for your next planning cycle?  
• Is it clear how marketing directly contributes to those objectives?  

• Does your organization have an aligned taxonomy around objectives and activities?  
• How are you measuring success for brand and marketing initiatives investments?  
• Are those metrics understood across brand and demand teams? Or are those metrics creating siloes between them?  
• Are those metrics enabling marketing to have a “seat at the table”? Or are those metrics creating distance with other executives/board? 

Download this worksheet to begin mapping your plan to business outcomes. 

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