By nickjohnson - April 15th, 2013
As part of the run up to the 2013 Incite Summit, we asked 300+ marketing and communications executives about the key issues they see impacting on their roles in 2013.
The future’s getting complicated
The first observation is quite how complex both roles will become in 2013 - and, significantly - the surprising level of harmony in the predicted key issues over two normally quite distinct job functions.
The four most important topics, as you’ll see in the chart above, are:
1. Customer-centricity:. Specifically, in this case, getting closer to the customer and understanding them better. What’s more, evolving the business so one’s customers are able to have a meaningful impact on business practices, strategy and future goals/products. This is quite clearly the most significant impact on roles in 2013 - across both functions. An enormous 46% of all respondents picked this as their top priority in 2013.
2. Multi-channel marketing/communications: Linked closely to the previous issue, multi-channel marketing focuses on how to integrate multiple marketing/comms channels to ensure they work in concert for an impactful, effective, and pervasive marketing campaign. A significant 22% picked this as top priority
2. Building unique customer experiences through more personalisation/segmentation/better consumer insight: Striving towards providing your customers with a personalised, engaging and unique relationship with your brand. Companies are beginning to do this through the increased segmentation made possible by social media/big data profiling, and by the proliferation of marketing/communications channels and platforms. Evidently, from the popularity of this option, it is a challenge that executives have not overcome completely. 10% picked this as top priority
4: Internal Collaboration: Focusing on more efficient internal collaboration between marketing and communications, to ensure that the company speaks with a unified voice, shares insight and responds better to consumers.7% picked this as top priority - which is significant in itself, but more so when one considers that 24% of Communications execs said this was priority #1, and only 5% of marketers. More on that in a later post.