Getting marketing strategies right in the fragmented digital age is the Chief Marketing Officer’s single biggest opportunity right now. Marketers should be planning across all consumer touch points if they are to build a successful brand; put simply, they must know how the consumer interacts anywhere and everywhere with their brand and develop a strategy to improve it. However, like all basic premises, the challenge remains in the execution. The reality is that many brands, particularly FMCG ones, continue to organise their marketing across silos with insufficient interaction between teams to truly deliver a connected brand experience.
Organisational Challenges
Millward Brown recently completed a US based study with a group of CMOs that found 38 percent of organisations set digital marketing strategies in silos and 41 percent have yet to centralise brand strategy planning. This means that brand strategies are being developed without any real visibility into all consumer interactions, rendering them at best inconsistent and at worst ineffective. Without a holistic view of consumers, the common brand threads that should run across campaigns will be weak, with effectiveness ultimately being sacrificed. We know from our experience here in Australia that the statistics are similar; it is a problem we discuss with clients day in and day out.
A siloed approach to digital can also mean mediocre media allocation and poor channel optimisation. As most marketers know, this continues to be a moving feast, but without a 360-degree view of brand interaction and performance, the chances of maximising media allocation and benefiting of synergies between media will be limited. As mobile and social channels continue to pick up speed, it will be critical for marketers to expand their channel measurement and continually review media spend and allocation.
Why Hold Back?
The following graphic represents the respondents to the survey’s desired allocation of how they would like to see their organisations time and effort designated to each marketing channel to drive best in class marketing.
However, while the chart shows the desired allocation of time and effort, only 19 percent of marketers are confident their organisation has the optimal mix between traditional and digital channels. Only 39 percent of marketers thought their teams effectively utilised the big data at their disposal, revealing that despite having more metrics at their disposal than ever before, marketing teams are struggling to separate relevant data from white noise. Part of this stems from the new unfamiliar metrics that digital channels bring, so as an industry, we need to embrace and develop new metrics alongside our existing approaches to do a better job of helping brands navigate this transformational marketing landscape.
What Should Brands be Doing?
First and foremost, marketers need to stitch together profiles of consumers across media, devices and purchase channels. Not an easy task and something that will call for insights from beyond standard research – surveys, focus groups, syndicated reports and customer insights toolbox – which must extend to more detailed behavioural research, holistic customer insights and with brave and smart marketers who are willing to connect the dots and make smart and clear decisions that may take a leap of faith compared to ‘how we used to do things’.
Secondly, when armed with this knowledge marketers need to ensure a central brand strategy that extends to all consumer touch points. A full brand perspective is required to navigate the changing media landscape as, although understanding the intricacies of each medium is important, it is all rendered useless if marketers don’t take a brand-centric approach. Simply linking digital strategy to the wider brand strategy is a little like putting a finger in the proverbial dyke. It may be fine for the here-and-now but going forward it will be disastrous.
Digital must have a seat at the brand strategy table in order to continue to build a healthy, strong and secure consumer brand. It is time for brands to stop talking about ‘digital marketing’ and start focusing on building a central, strong and valuable brand that resonates and engages across all the channels its customer interacts with.
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