New research from the CMO Council investigates how organizations are faring when it comes to responding to customers, and leveraging customer data and intelligence to deliver the right experience in the right moment—and through the channel of the customer’s choice, whether it is a digital or physical touchpoint.
The new report, The Responsiveness Requirement: How Agile Marketers Act on Consumer Feedback to Drive Growth, looks at some of the obstacles in achieving a consistent, connected brand experience across all marketing channels, drawing on new research undertaken by the CMO Council in partnership with X-Rite, Pantone, Esko, MediaBeacon and AVT, who together are global innovators in the marketing and product packaging supply chains.
According to the study, responding quickly to consumer feedback and requests through physical touchpoints such as product packaging and other physical branded elements is a significant challenge for marketers—and marketers have not prioritized addressing this challenge.
Respondents noted a gap between their ability to make changes to physical media and their aspirations for speed—84 percent said they would like to be able to make changes within 30 days, but only 40 percent currently report that they can.
Additional key findings of the report include:
- Sixty-six percent of marketing leaders reported their end consumers were very sensitive or extremely sensitive to variations in packaging color and consistency
- Marketing leaders rank product packaging and in-store displays as more important to the success of the overall experience than channels like email, direct mail and mobile apps, which fail to crack the “Top 10 List” of critical channels.
- Forty-six percent of respondents said that functional silos across the marketing landscape have separated teams into physical or digital groups, enabling specialization and functional focus but making alignment and cohesion across these channels even more difficult.
“If brands can’t respond quickly and with great control, they will be seen as irrelevant,” said Ron Voigt, president of X-Rite, in a news release. “Responsiveness is the result of digitizing, automating and connecting processes in the color workflow such that instead of taking weeks, they take days or even hours.”
In order to rise to the responsiveness challenge, organizations must simplify their value supply chain by digitizing tasks, automating workflows, and systems and improving communication among teams, departments and suppliers.
The CMO Council study was conducted in the spring of 2017 and includes input from more than 153 senior marketing executives. Fifty-four (54) percent of respondents hold a title of CMO, Head of Marketing or Senior Vice President of Marketing, and 33 percent represent brands with revenues in excess of $1 billion (USD).
