Technology & Innovation

Digital experience fuels marketers’ career ambitions

March 19, 2018

Global

March 19, 2018

Global

Disruption puts marketers under pressure to innovate, but their experience with digital technology equips them to be tomorrow’s leaders.

Digitisation has changed almost everything about the way that today’s customers engage with companies. They’re exposed daily to a barrage of online advertising. They use review sites, social networks and price comparison services to decide on purchases. And later, they broadcast their experiences, both good and bad, to global audiences online.

All this has huge implications for marketing professionals, who must be equally adept at using digital tools and approaches to maximise reach and engagement and understand better why consumers make the choices that they do.

Given that backdrop, it is no wonder that marketing executives stand out from their counterparts in other functions by the degree to which they feel the effects of digital disruption, according to a recent survey of 800 business executives in France, Germany, the UK and the Netherlands, conducted by The Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by Salesforce.

When respondents from marketing, IT, sales and customer service were asked about the extent to which their company had been affected in the past three years, 61% of marketing executives say “significantly” or “extremely”, compared with an average of 53% for the other three functions.

This disruption is changing company priorities: according to marketing executives, improving technical infrastructure (41%), improving the customer experience (41%) and expanding into new markets (40%) have all grown in priority as a result of digital disruption in the past three years.

In turn, the pressure to innovate is mounting. When asked what obligations these shifting priorities place on their department, the most common answer among marketing leaders is: “We need to be more innovative”.

The innovation imperative

Innovation is a big theme in marketing at global electronics giant Philips, according to the company’s global head of digital marketing and media, Blake Cahill. Ten years ago, he points out, there weren’t billions of people interacting daily on a handful of hugely dominant social networks. 

“The whole outside ecosystem has shifted. You have to be innovative to break through the clutter, the noise, all the voices on so many platforms. It’s just a lot, lot harder for a brand to stand out these days.”

A prime example of Philips’ approach to marketing innovation is a social media campaign that the company launched to coincide with the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos in January 2018, focusing on the questions that children have about healthcare, using the #futurehealth and #YoungWEF hashtags. It centres on a YouTube video and a call to action for people to post their own children’s questions online.

“For us, this was about asking, ‘how do we get the most in terms of awareness and thought leadership around our investment in sending our most senior executives to this incredibly high-profile event, one that the whole world is watching?’” says Mr Cahill. “We are there to influence policymakers and business leaders, but it’s also an opportunity to bring consumers into the healthcare debate and to convey to them who we are, what we do in healthcare and what we stand for as a brand.”

The survey shows that this need for innovation is affecting the ways that marketing executives run their departments. When asked how digital disruption has affected their work, 42% of marketing executives say that they have become more focused on innovation and experimentation than process and organisation, a greater proportion than among their counterparts in IT, sales or customer service (see chart one). And seven out of ten agree that innovation will increase in significance as a leadership skill in the next three years.

Converging responsibilities

Our study found that, across all functions and roles, digital disruption is eroding traditional barriers between business departments. This is especially true of the marketing function. In particular, the role of the marketing department is merging with that of the IT function: four out of five marketing respondents (80%) say their responsibilities have merged with those of IT.

Marketing executives also report high levels of overlap with sales and customer services, with one in four (26%) believing that their department must become more sales-focused and almost as many (23%) saying that they must be more concerned with the customer experience.

Mr Cahill attributes this convergence to the ability to “track and trace” inputs and results across functional lines in the business. It’s now possible to establish how a digital marketing campaign leads to increased sales for a particular product, for example, or how poor customer experience affects sales, he says. “Digital shines a light on inherent dependencies between functions that perhaps were always there but were hidden from view.”

But in order to explore these dependencies and identify the patterns that lie within, marketers will need a “big data mindset”, he says. “It’s my key piece of advice to anyone looking to build a successful career in marketing: build your data and analytic capabilities above all else. Be able to look at data, interpret it and make decisions.”

Survey respondents might do well to follow that advice themselves. When asked how confident they are as a leader in their data analysis skills, only 59% define themselves as “confident” or “very confident”. That is on a par with their peers in customer service, but behind IT (70%) and sales (63%).

For Mr Cahill, confidence with data analytics is crucial to innovation in marketing. “In the digital world, a marketing campaign that was a big hit last year may not work this year, or on a different platform,” he explains. “It may not resonate with a different audience. You need to know if it worked or if it didn’t—and you can only glean that insight from data. And you need to keep trying and comparing new results with previous ones.”

The digitisation of marketing is a double-edged sword for marketing leaders in terms of career progression, the survey reveals. Just over a third of respondents say they are concerned “about the impact of digital technology and automation on my career prospects” (37%), more than among respondents from sales and IT. And more than half (58%) agree that the blurring of departmental boundaries makes it harder to plan their professional progression.

But marketers are also the most ambitious of the executives included in the study—39% aim to be either a board director or a CEO in future (see chart 2) —and their exposure to digital technology seems to have boosted their confidence. They are most likely to agree that their current role provides them with the opportunities to develop the leadership skills required by digital disruption, for example, and nearly eight in ten (78%) believe that it is likely that their role will expand significantly to include responsibility for other departments in the next three years.

This is good news for marketers, but perhaps not for their employers: marketers are also the most likely to expect to leave their current company for a role better suited to their experience.

Download PDF (English)

Download PDF (German)

Download PDF (French)

Download PDF (Dutch)

Enjoy in-depth insights and expert analysis - subscribe to our Perspectives newsletter, delivered every week