Marketing and communication departments have one huge problem inside brands. They are not respected; thought they are quite connected and hold a lot of valuable 1st party data and consumer insights. The average lifespan of a Chief Marketing Officer is just over three years, much less than other C-level executives.

One of the reasons for CMO's and marketing not being respected is that companies look at digital short-term results, not long-term brand building numbers. Also, CMO's power inside companies has diminished when already up to 25 % of marketing budgets goes to marketing technology, and that is usually CDO's or CTO's responsibility.

One reason is money. To be more exact, not talking about money. I have learned in my life is that the respect of marketing and comms rises when you are able to speak in the management board in the same language as everyone else. The language is numbers.

Now I am not a numbers person. I am PowerPoint, not Excel. I come from creative line of marketing, starting my career as a journalist, and shifted to online content, commercial content, digital platforms, social media and influencers and finally digital marketing.

During the course from shifting in my career from creative to business I have had to learn to speak in the business language about the things I do. I do not talk about things like engagement, reading time of articles or brand attribute scores to top management, but concrete target group we have reached, how many conversions we have been able to get or how we can be more efficient in our marketing operations. When speaking in the language a business executive understands, you will earn respect and you are seen as very useful.

There are only a few people who rise from marketing or communication verticals ever to be a CEO, but to studies show, that those companies that have a CEO with a marketing background, also have better business results.

Changing landscape of marketing due to digital transformation

Being a marketer was easy a while back. It was always the 'Year of TV', for decades. In an increasing speed we are experiencing 'Year of mobile', 'CRM', 'marketing automation', 'DMP', 'CDP'.

Now almost every customer touchpoint presents opportunities to market, sell, and provide service. We have new tools from humble marketing automation techniques to send newsletters to complex systems that take care of marketing campaigns and do dynamic content creation in the same time.

Digital has changed the scope, rules, and tools of marketing. Marketing is compelled to aspire toward consumers rather than expecting consumers to seek toward them. Initiatives are no longer based on appealing to the mass audiences, they are personalized and instant. Traditional boundaries between marketing, sales, and service are disappearing.

The result is an increase of customer expectations in terms of relevancy, delight, privacy, and personal connections. We should ask ourselves: How can we use technology to make consumers’ lives easier? How can we enhance our services to strengthen their relationship to our brand? How can we, as marketers or communicators be more useful to our brands?

I talked about these issues and offered a case study and some solutions in the IZAZOV 2020 forum as a keynote speaker in the beginning of June. Please listen to the speech in YouTube.

Learn a lesson from Nokia

Marketers have access to huge amounts of data from targeted marketing campaigns and all owned media actions. But if you do not know how to leverage all that data to your company’s' benefit, you will not survive.

I might sound like an alarmist, but I am from Finland, the country of Nokia. You remember, those sturdy colourful phones everyone had in the 2000's. They were the world's most prominent mobile phone sellers to more than 10 years, but completely vanished from the market.

There is this legend that is told in Finland: When people in Nokia saw the first iPhone, they laughed. Laughed. They were so confident of their way of doing it and did not realize that touchscreens it is going to revolutionize their whole industry.

They did not realize the future will always replace the trends of yesterday.

So be wiser than Nokia. Embrace the future. Embrace and own data strategy, marketing technology projects, analytical endeavours, 1st party data, learning new and boost digital development in your company. Leverage data across the company and make you mission heard, understood, and believed in.

We in Dentsu are experts in digital transformation projects for companies of all sizes, so if you need help, please be in contact. We would love to guide you through this.

Best Regards,

Heli Ruotsalainen

Business Development Director

Dentsu Aegis Network