CMO.com Highlights – Marketers in an Ever-Evolving World

Last week’s CMO.com exclu­sives fea­tured some of the con­sid­er­a­tions both mar­keters and their organ­i­sa­tions should make in today’s mar­ket­ing world. In this ever-evolv­ing world, mar­keters have a lot more career options than they did in the past. Organ­i­sa­tions, as well, have many more oppor­tu­ni­ties to reach con­sumers, and it’s impor­tant that they imple­ment the changes nec­es­sary to stay com­pet­i­tive with oth­er com­pa­nies’ mar­ket­ing efforts. Any change is bound to involve chal­lenges, and last week’s exclu­sives touched on pos­si­ble changes and offered help­ful tips for suc­cess­ful­ly nav­i­gat­ing some of them.

The week began with an inter­view with Jen­ny Ash­more, Pres­i­dent of The Char­tered Insti­tute of Mar­ket­ing. The CIM aims to devel­op the mar­ket­ing and sales pro­fes­sions by help­ing mar­ket­ing and sales prac­ti­tion­ers improve their skills. Ash­more not­ed that it’s an excit­ing time for mar­keters. Where­as mar­keters in the past may have had one or two career cours­es to choose from, today’s mar­keters have more oppor­tu­ni­ties to pur­sue careers that line up with their inter­ests. More­over, mar­keters can choose a path where they feel they can make the most dif­fer­ence. Ash­more also dis­cussed the role CIM serves in help­ing indi­vid­u­als map out their career paths.

Gra­ham Rud­dick, CEO of Com­mu­ni­tize, touched on dis­cus­sions from the Adobe Design Advan­tage Forum about the role of design strat­e­gy in dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion and the impor­tance of the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. For com­pa­nies try­ing to embrace dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion, great design is an impor­tant deliv­ery focus in shap­ing the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. In fact, accord­ing to Jon Hunter, head of design at Trans­port for Lon­don, design and the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence should be inex­tri­ca­bly linked.

Mar­ius Smyth, Man­ag­ing Direc­tor of EMEA AdRoll, addressed the dis­con­nect that many com­pa­nies face between their mar­ket­ing and bud­get­ing met­rics. Smyth encour­ages mar­keters to spend time with their com­pa­nies’ finan­cial depart­ments in devel­op­ing their mar­ket­ing met­rics. This ensures that both depart­ments are on the same page. Also impor­tant is that every indi­vid­ual in a com­pa­ny uti­lizes the same ter­mi­nol­o­gy when dis­cussing busi­ness objec­tives. Mar­keters should track suc­cess and keep every­one in the com­pa­ny active­ly engaged in the company’s mar­ket­ing strategies.

The week end­ed with some refresh­ing insights by Katz Kiely, CEO and Founder of Kiely & Co, on imple­ment­ing change in an organ­i­sa­tion and the role of data in those changes. She began by high­light­ing the need for change in a world that is con­stant­ly evolv­ing before touch­ing on some help­ful tips for suc­cess­ful­ly nav­i­gat­ing change. Kiely drew on her own expe­ri­ence of redesign­ing an event that hadn’t changed in 40 years while the world around it had changed sig­nif­i­cant­ly. Seek­ing answers as to why peo­ple are so adverse to change, Kiely began look­ing into the behav­iour­al sci­ences. This led her to devel­op some tools to nudge peo­ple in an organ­i­sa­tion along through change. Kiely also touched on the key to find­ing effec­tive change agents.

We invite you to take some time to engage with our exclu­sive con­tent on CMO.com and learn from some of the world’s top mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion­als. Please let us know what you think.