As data becomes more important to customer strategies, marketers are gravitating toward hiring people with more analytical skills. How do new marketing talent strategies enable this shift – while retaining the creative part?
Marketing was once pegged as a field for creatives, but the rise in big data and artificial intelligence has changed the demands of the profession. Now, marketers aim to uncover the most nuanced insights about their customers and connect brand messages to those moments in their daily lives. Similarly, there’s a growing expectation that marketers can bring these insights back into the organization to help inform everything from purpose to customer data.
In this more data-intensive environment, we already see marketers gravitating toward hiring more analytical skills. When we surveyed 556 global chief marketing officers (CMOs) and asked them to identify the top skills of their highest performers, analytical expertise edged out creative skills in almost every industry, with the exception of the consumer industry – something that would be almost unheard of 10 years ago (figure 1).
Meghan Nameth, senior vice president of marketing at Loblaw Companies Limited, Canada’s leading food and pharmacy retailer, explains why these more analytical skill sets are rising in importance: “Our sources of creativity and our paradigms around where creative thinking comes from are shifting. Some of the most creative people I’ve ever worked with are data scientists. That might be surprising given I’ve worked with some amazing agencies and creative partners. But part of what really great data scientists do is they make lateral connections between what looks like disparate points of information.”
But make no mistake, this isn’t a one-to-one swap of creative skills for analytical and technical skills. Instead, it’s about convening data scientists, strategists, programmers, and creatives together to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts – which isn’t always the easiest or most straightforward endeavor.
Shifting To A More Collaborative Mindset
At its core, bringing these skills together will require greater collaboration. However, this too will likely require a mindset shift for most CMOs, who may be more used to working on a linear production schedule. This is especially true when comparing CMOs with their executive peers: While other executives routinely identified collaboration as a top skill, the CMOs prioritized it lower than the rest of the C-suite did (figure 2).
With the goal of getting ever closer to the customer, collaboration, both internally and externally, can be key to building a creative engine that moves at the speed of culture. In this spirit, we discuss how marketers can design more agile team structures and rethink external relationships, such as influencer strategies, to capture the most important customer insights and meet customers in the moments that matter.
Fueling Intelligent Creative With Agile Teams
Finding the right talent structure can be fatiguing. And every time an organization undergoes an organizational redesign that doesn’t work, resistance for future change management initiatives can increase.
Instead of focusing on massive overhauls, the answer may be to make smaller, more agile changes that focus around a single objective. Nameth believes in taking an approach to organizational structure where different skills are brought together to solve a single problem:
From a structural standpoint, it’s really hard to teach lateral thinking; one way to compensate where you may not have that naturally is to build “pods,” where you have a data science person, a data engineering team, graphic designers, and a demand gen[eration] team connected so that you get different thinking on one problem. If your objective is to attract more customers into your retail environment, what are all the signals or moments along the way that would shift their journey?
For Loblaw, that objective, for instance, may be to understand the varying consideration points to entering its retail stores: “It may mean if [customers] are heading to a different store, reminding them through an advertisement that we have better pricing or intervening in digital when they’re searching for a store location.”
Another complication is global consistency. Nanne Bos, the chief communications officer of Netherlands-based financial firm Aegon, says, “The most effective and future-proof approach to global marketing is not centralized nor decentralized, but about increasing coherence across markets – while allowing for flexibility.” Bos indicates this can be achieved by “setting up a global design hub that allows a local customer experience team not only to download design elements but also to upload [them] so that other markets can use them as well.”
The Agency And The Influencer: Creative At The Speed Of Culture
Agencies are often core to creative execution for many brands. But, as many agencies work with various clients, the work produced can sometimes feel more commoditized rather than bespoke. Simultaneously, the social influencer has exploded as a “go-to” product spokesperson. And these individuals are closer to products – and customers – than almost anyone.
Brands don’t have to myopically view social influencers just as product reviewers. Instead, they may be the next iteration of the creative agency. In fact, one entertainment company is now providing briefs to known influencers in their target demographics and asking them to assist in developing the creative content. This means moving the relationship from “influencer” to “creator” and putting those individuals at the center of the brand to work on bigger-picture creative challenges. We saw this manifest organically with the social-influencer–driven “100 baby challenge” in Sims 4, where gamers competed against one another to see who could produce 100 digital babies the fastest. In essence, influencers didn’t just review products; they influenced user behavior. Brands can do the same by augmenting their brand-influencer relationships with challenges and creative briefs.
When Kjetil Undhjem, the head of marketing and brand strategy at Australian-based bank ANZ, discusses influencer strategies, he says, “You can’t just pick [influencers] because they are famous; you have to pick one that has that interest and has that following, and then you can give them a fair bit of freedom in terms of how they create that content.” This means making sure they know the subject matter, such as financial well-being.
Further, in some regions such as China, the influencer marketing industry is years ahead of most of the world as influencer agencies are already on the rise. Recently, global social media platform TikTok started hosting “creator camps” where influencers “provide strategic counsel to brands.”
Integrating A Remote Workforce To Fill The Skills Gap
Even the best-designed teams need the proper backgrounds and skill sets to be successful. And with 63% of college-educated employees from our survey of 11,500 global respondents working remotely, marketers are confronted with both opportunities and considerations for making this digital-physical construct of work successful.
Broadening The Aperture
Steve Carlile, the CMO of online cosmetics company Younique Products, has seen the rise in remote work permanently change how the brand sources talent – to the strategic advantage of the company. The benefits include gaining access to specialized skill sets, building a more diverse workforce, and, in many cases, bringing workers geographically closer to business partners and suppliers. As Carlile explains, “We were able to find the right talent, and, as we expanded the geographic scope, we were intentional about it.”
Based out of Utah, Younique was able to enhance its R&D and product marketing functions through the remote workforce. Further, with manufacturing partners based on the US East Coast and Europe, Younique hired a head of R&D “a stone’s throw away from being able to plug in closely with our manufacturing partners.” And in terms of diversity, while Utah has a relatively homogeneous population, Younique was able to cultivate a more representative talent base that better reflects the customers it serves – an increasingly important dimension when trying to be culturally relevant.
Optimizing Hybrid
While remote work will carry on, hybrid brings a new element to consider. Bill Beck, the CMO of health insurance company Anthem, sees the power of bringing key portions of strategic work together for in-person collaboration. For instance, when Anthem was designing a new creative platform, Beck recognizes the moment the team came together to think through the execution of the platform as a key turning point in the project’s development. Beck notes, “It just reminds me of the importance of being together. Especially as a marketer, the face-to-face collaboration from a creative aspect is where we’re going with hybrid.”
For the CMO, it’s less about organizational redesigns and more about a cultural shift – one that reshapes how marketers work toward common goals that unlock compelling creative.
About The Research: 2022 Global Marketing Trends
The Global Marketing Trends Executive Survey polled 1,099 C-suite executives from global companies located in the United States, France, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands in April 2021. This survey asked chief executive, marketing, information, finance, operating, legal, and human resource officers their thoughts on a variety of topics driving the evolution of the marketing function.
The Global Marketing Trends Consumer Survey polled 11,500 global consumers, ages 18 and above, in May 2021 across 19 countries.
originally posted on deloitte.com by Christine Cutten, Livia Zufferli, Shaunna Conway and David Phillips
About Authors:
Christine Cutten: Customer Transformation | Monitor Deloitte
Christine is a principal of Deloitte Consulting LLP and a leader within the Customer Transformation practice. In her 10-year tenure with Deloitte and more than her 20 year career, Christine has helped CMOs rethink their marketing strategies and operations by working alongside them to design their roadmaps to the future. She received a Bachelor of Science degree from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania and her MBA from Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University.
Livia Zufferli: Partner, Consulting, Customer & Marketing
Livia is a senior marketing executive with more than 20 years of experience in retail and consumer goods. As a strategic brand builder and creative marketer, she has helped companies enter new markets, launch new brands, and relaunch existing offerings to keep pace with evolving consumer needs. A leader in Deloitte’s Customer and Marketing practice, Livia’s areas of focus include brand strategy, integrated marketing planning, communication strategy, advertising, and creative/content development.
Shaunna Conway: National Advertising, Marketing & Commerce Leader
Shaunna is a marketing and customer experience-focused leader who helps clients with transformational technology programs. Her strong technology implementation background, coupled with her focus on strategy and people, helps organizations go beyond the technology to influence and drive value for the business from a strategic perspective. Shaunna has extensive experience working with clients to develop their end-to-end customer experience and digital strategy through marketing, analytics, and e-commerce technology. Shaunna has worked with Canada’s top financial services and telecommunications firms. Prior to joining Deloitte, she held a variety of senior roles at IBM Canada, which included leading the sales organization and channel strategy for IBM’s marketing, e-commerce, and supply chain solutions. Prior to that, she was the senior executive responsible for Bell Canada’s P&L and IT services outsourcing agreement, for which she led a matrix team in four geographies, including Canada and India.
David Phillips: Partner, Consulting
David brings nearly twenty years of experience across a range of commercial disciplines from a local and global perspective. These disciplines include: organisational strategy, brand (custodianship and communication), general management, insights and innovation. Prior to establishing the Brand, Creative and Media practice at Deloitte, David led strategy and media at one of Australia’s most successful agencies. He has an MBA from Melbourne Business School, and has established two successful start-ups in the research and psychometric strategy fields. While David’s particular strength has seen him recognised as a leader in marketing strategy for consumer brands, he has also led client and agency teams across the public sector, as well as, education, financial services and the retail industry, distinguishing David as one of the region’s leading marketing strategists.
