As I mentioned on a previous post, CMO's are faced with huge challenges in the coming years. Earlier this week I attended the CMO Exchange at The Doral in Miami. While the individual topics were interesting, the diverse group of CMO's still had significant commonality in the issues there were facing.
Being an email guy, I was fascinated to learn how many of the key brands we talked to still were not segmenting data and taking advantage of the information they've been collecting on their customers and prospects for years. This fascinates me since in almost all of my selling experiences for the last 15 years, dynamic content, segmentation and reporting by response and behavorial data is always a key reason for buying marketing technology.
So if the technology (remember, technology matters) can support these functions, why aren't the brands we talked to doing this? Revenue pressure from the top combined with organizations not separating out "digital revenue" from channel specific revenue seems to be the cause. It seems as though companies aren't doing a great job of revenue attribution and are still relying on an overall contribution number from the macro channel called digital. CMO's are going to have to dive deeper into their numbers as consumer behavior shifts from brand centric (my favorite retailer) to product centric (I don't care where I buy it, but I want IT).
2013 is the year for change and challenges and CMO's are going to have to lead the cultural shift inside their organizations to increase revenue.
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