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At the latest Marketing Vanguard Summit last week in Chicago, the industry’s top CMOs gathered under Chatham House rules to share their biggest challenges and work together to solve them, and future-proof their organizations for an uncertain future.
Here’s what we learned:
It’s time to toss the old playbook, and that’s a good thing
A lot of legacy thought around brand identity and team structure are being rewritten. Marketers are discarding category clichés and experimenting with unexpected channels, activations, and the tone they use to address their customers. Tone is a big one because being agile on social media and coming up with original messages have become the new table stakes.
Retain, retain, retain
It’s getting more expensive to find new customers, in part because it’s harder than ever to find them due to fragmentation. The smartest marketers have focused on retention—an especially important metric in an uncertain economy. Driving conversions is great, but the customer journey really needs to encompass what happens after the sale, and how marketers can offer better value and service. This is how you get advocacy and long-term growth.
You must use business terms to prove your value to the CFO
Chief financial officers don’t care about return on ad spend (or ROAS). The only acronym they care about is return on investment (or ROI), and if marketers want to sell their strategies up the chain, they need to understand the language spoken by the purse-string holders. The most effective leaders are translating creativity into CFO-ready language—focusing on ROI, customer lifetime value, and performance that matters to the broader C-suite.
Getting into culture drives growth, and it’s not a one-way street
It’s been established that focusing on inclusivity and representation attracts and keeps more customers. But it’s a two-way street. Just as brands want to shape culture, smart marketers need to let culture shape their brand in return. That means being open to co-creation, building authentic partnerships, and keeping an open dialog with overlooked communities.
Visibility is good except when it’s not
A lot of CMOs want to maintain a big public profile. While it can help juice influence and make you more effective at your job, there’s a downside: Overexposure can backfire. A lot of marketing leaders are now rethinking what meaningful visibility looks like, going from splashy conference appearances to thinking about ways to more strategically, and quietly, interact with the marketing community and beyond. It goes beyond just being a big presence.
