Americans exhibit a more positive perspective on marketing as a whole, closely followed by India.
In a recently released GfK report, called ‘CMO Outlook Index’ they say, in a global research involving over 600 chief marketing officers and senior marketing decision-makers, they found out that Europe and the rest of the world have a more pessimistic view compared to America and India.
The report says factors that drive effective marketing for leaders in marketing are categorised into three pillars: Impact (capability of team and demonstration of ROI), Alignment (leveraging the brand’s commercial value and purpose), and Investment (C-suite commitment to brand and marketing investment).
“It is relatively common for CMOs to have optimised either their marketing team’s ability or their company’s brand alignment or its brand investment. The huge drop-off comes when we look at who feels optimally positioned across all three areas. The findings from our CMO Outlook Index help marketing leaders to understand how their peers perceive marketing and where growth is needed,” comments Gonzalo Garcia Villanueva, CMO, GfK.
Companies where marketing leaders see strong ‘Alignment’ have more responsibilities assigned to marketing teams.
The ‘Alignment’ pillar relates to leveraging the brand’s commercial value and purpose: A quarter of all marketing decision-makers in the survey very strongly agree that their company has a clearly defined mission and purpose beyond commercial goals, followed by the brand’s contribution to the company’s commercial success.
In companies where the marketing leader feels they have a strong brand purpose, marketing typically has more influence. 81 percent of the marketing leaders in such companies include product development as a responsibility of marketing (compared to 69 percent average for all respondents). Seventy-eight percent say the same for pricing (compared to 67 percent average).
Sixty percent of decision-makers in the survey prioritise long-term brand building in marketing allocations.
For the ‘Investment’ pillar, GfK looked at the balance between long-term brand building and short-term sales growth, as well as the backing of CEOs and CFOs for investing in long-term brand strategies.
Nineteen percent of marketing leaders in the survey consider themselves to be optimally positioned in both categories. Within this group, 60 percent say they spend at least seven in 10 of their marketing dollars on long-term brand building, compared to 52 percent of all respondents. This level of long-term investment seems high but likely captures the budget beyond immediate media and production costs.
Twenty percent of the decision-makers believe they are ideally positioned regarding ‘Impact’.
They have a strong team with all necessary skills and a good understanding of which activities, channels, and marketing levers deliver the best ROI. Of these, 59 percent are extremely confident that their data, analytics, and insights systems will be able to answer the critical business questions of the future.
This contrasts sharply with only 28 percent of the full set of respondents being able to make the same claim. ‘Impact’ leaders are more likely than average to say they have mature capabilities in areas like customer segmentation, campaign optimisation, and extracting insights from data.
As expected, there are regional differences in outlook. The Americans exhibit a more positive perspective on marketing as a whole, closely followed by India. In the case of Europe and the rest of the world, they have a more pessimistic view. All can agree that marketing investment makes sense – just what to invest, where, and when are key. For instance, In India, 30 percent of those surveyed expressed their commitment to investing in the brand, both in the short and long term.