Ashley Friedlein identifies three priorities for CMOs: becoming data-driven, managing the full customer journey across channels, and building a marketing culture that attracts talent. She argues talent is the biggest challenge and the key to solving everything else.
The three key areas that I think are most important for a CMO or for the marketing function generally. And they're three quite broad things. But the first is data and there are lots of aspects to that. Partly is getting better at data driven marketing, the analytics and reporting and optimization that goes around that part of it is about the skills and competencies that you're going to need to have there. The there's also things like governance and privacy and GDPR coming along now. So it's a complex topic to get your head around, but you have to do it. The second is customer experience. Again, that's a broad term, but it means understanding not just the product and service that you're marketing, but all of the wrapping and the customer journey around that, the content you're putting out. I like the idea of design thinking, which people at IBM have been talking about a lot of, and the customer journey and the Personas as they go through those journeys across and again, multi or omni channel. So not just digital and physical and in store and on the phone, but how you join that all up into a customer experience. Because I think that customers really care about that. So we as marketers need to care about that. And there are certain more specialist areas like mobile being a good example where I still think we are. Although we know that most digital interactions now are mobile, we don't spend as much time and effort getting those mobile experiences as good as we should do as marketers. And the third thing is culture. So that's about creating a culture within the marketing team and function and indeed hopefully the wider business which attracts and retains that marketing talent. And that's things about always learning. It's about collaboration, it's about being agile, customer centric, data driven, those sorts of things. The single biggest challenge for me as a marketing leader or for any marketing leader, I think is talent. I mean, it's not a new thing necessarily, but I was talking about the opportunities or challenge around say data, customer experience and culture. The way to solve those in a way is to have great people. And that's great talent. And actually great talent is they can deal with challenges around change and digital transformation things because they just, they're good people, you know. So the challenge, really, the single biggest challenge I don't think is necessarily data or technology or budgets or changing consumer behavior, all of which are true, but it's getting the best people to actually take on those challenges. A lot of that is about having a clear vision for, and ideally quite an ambitious vision about where you want to go what you want to achieve as a marketing function within the business because good people tend to be attracted by big ideas, bold visions and things. That's part about being a good leader generally I think the culture as I mentioned which is a challenge or an opportunity again that's hugely important and so that's the sort of environment you create that might be as simple as a physical environment but also the collaborative ways of working increased flexibility, helping people learn, achieve their goals, empowerment, autonomy, responsibility. A lot of these things I think attract and keep talent and the final thing is a team. A team people tend to employ A team players whereas B team people employ C team. Anyway the point being if you can get good people in they will tend to attract other good people. So know start somewhere find that talent it's not going to be cheap sadly and you know nurture that and they will start to attract other people in.
