De Swaan Arons, usually based in New York, is currently in South Africa to hold local roundtables with marketing industry leaders, and to serve as guest speaker at the APEX awards. He says South Africa “feels like home” based on his Dutch and English ancestry. He was excited to attend the APEX awards, as they’ve been likened with the Effies, fittingly awarded for global effectiveness, as he says “No other award matters – it’s pointless to be creative without garnering an actual response. Your work needs to target your customers to actually get out there and buy your product.”
Fittingly, his keynote presentation at the APEX awards focused on Vermeer’s Marketing2020 and Insight2020 studies. In a nutshell, Marketing2020 – Organizing for Growth is a global marketing study involving over 350 CEOs, CMOs and agency heads and more than 10,000 marketers worldwide, making it the most marketing-representative study that’s ever been conducted. It focused on identifying how business leaders can best align their strategy, structure, and capabilities to generate business growth and was built to benchmark and share best practices from the industry. Insights2020 then builds on this and further drives customer-centric growth.
Explaining the studies’ origin, de Swaan Arons spoke of Vermeer’s role as WPP’s marketing strategy consultancy and said that, having worked at Unilever for 14 years, he lived the marketer’s challenge: While what we buy and sell has changed over the past five years, the organisational structure behind it has stayed the same. Marketing in the digital age requires a new mindset, and to grow and succeed in this new marketing world he says we need to look at the strategy of those brands that are winning, particularly in focusing on the organisational strategy that enables them to flourish for inspiration, with the company’s chief marketing officer leading the process. It then needs to grow from simply being a white board idea to a true partnership that maps the chart of winning brands. It’s a benchmarking opportunity for success, he says – it’s not just about which brand is the loudest, but which marketing has actually proven effective in growing the business.
There’s been a definite shift these past 20 years where marketing has moved from the corporate dog house, where it was seen as being a big spend with little impact, to now having earned its stripes with a seat in the boardroom as a valuable business partner.
But to what extent do marketers actually influence business strategy? De Swaan Arons lists a few demotivators as mainly being internal, for example, customers are not receiving consistent service levels across various touchpoints with the business. There’s been a disconnect across levels of customer care and between sales and the marketing message. In addition, marketers feel stressed to make sure they know enough and are constantly learning on a personal level; that they’re backing the right technology and making the right call when it comes to selecting an advertising agency.
These findings were highly correlated in the study, with data (De Swaan Arons is hesitant to call it ‘big data’) still driving decision-making in this time of data-obesity. Having a clear business purpose was identified as a driver of success, as was the ideal of offering the consumer a total experience. “Few of us work in commoditised markets, these days each brand claims to be the best in its field,” he explains, so premium pricing is driven by effective use of marketing data, which will be hugely important in the future as we adapt marketing messages to include more personalised information and brands create more value than simply driving product sales. It’s about knowing why they buy, not just what they buy.
Don’t be fooled that this is merely the realm of the marketer, though – driving purpose and culture throughout the company needs to be a long-term strategy with consistency across all touchpoints. As we step bravely into the future, remember that communication is about more than corporate vision: It’s also strategy, reorganisation, becoming more nimble, being creative, experimenting, and integrating with other disciplines. Leverage the data at your fingertips smartly to create better customer experiences. As an example of this, De Swaan Arons lists the insurance companies overseas that offer their customers discounts on their premiums for driving safely and avoiding routes through crime or accident hot-spots – it may seem like an invasion of personal privacy to the older generation, but remember that Millennials get annoyed if you don’t use the data they provide you with to improve their experience with your brand. In the long run, it adds value and leads to a better overall customer experience, which is the key to long-term business success.
So, be transparent about your business purpose, reconnect with it and embrace technology to ensure you make a difference in the world by constantly pioneering and creating a total experience your customers love in the new marketing world.
Click here to download the Vermeer Marketing2020 PDF, here to download the Vermeer Insights2020 PDF, here to visit the Millward Brown press office and don’t miss all our #APEX2016 feedback!
