For 2021 planning, IDC’s CMO Advisory Service analysts recommend a stronger focus on the following areas:
Show your brand’s human side: Customers’ and consumers’ behavior increasingly shows that brand loyalty is on shaky ground. Customers no longer make buying decisions solely on the merits of your product portfolio. Customers are increasingly looking at how you treat your employees, respond to crisis, and walk the talk on your social responsibility positions. Customers want brands to reach out in empathetic and helpful ways. Now more than ever, customers want brands that act trustworthy and care about their customer’s experience. They want brands to show them their human side.
Mature your digital capabilities: It is time to release digital from registered nurse database a vertical box and move it into a horizontal capability running across all marketing programming. Digital will become an always-on layer of engagement and experience for customers. Reimagine your programs to adjust to a blend of digital and physical worlds. Integrate and connect your customer data to orchestrate personalized brand moments. Build new skill sets in user experience (UX), digital experience, digital content creation, production, and data operations.
Build resiliency and adaptability: How do you find success in a business, global health, and a societal climate of constant, unpredictable change? You avoid traditional, outdated approaches to managing and operating your business. It is time to plan, organize, and resource to best respond to acceleration. Adopting an agile mindset is critical to the path forward in a world with increasing volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. An agile mindset is a revisioning of your organization’s work into a constant flow, with shorter bursts of focus concentrated on efforts, testing, learning, and quickly adjusting priorities. Your mantra becomes “fast beats perfect” as you break down siloed walls, embrace collaborative leadership, and build connective tissue across customer-related functions. Success is measured by outcomes versus output.
The executive summary of the IDC Tech Marketing 2020 Benchmark survey is available to all IDC clients. For information about obtaining the full survey report or a custom analysis comparing your company to a group of your peers, please contact your IDC account manager or Warren Lane [email protected].
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