BLOG

5 Biggest Challenges Facing Marketing & How to Solve Them

Muddled strategies. Flagging energy. Uncooperative coworkers. Almost every brand faces a struggle sometimes.

Today, customer preferences, digital technologies, and global markets are constantly changing the way we do business. This means that marketing needs to keep up. Unfortunately, this is not as simple as it sounds.

Here, we will examine 5 key challenges that marketers are facing right now, as well as how to overcome them using transformation in capability and charge.

1. The Need for Transformational Innovation

Marketing focused on “my brand is better than your brand” strategies supported by incremental innovation and conventional programs rarely create sales growth because markets have a lot of inertia. The only way to grow is through big idea innovation that will create enhancements or augmentations of the offering that will be regarded by customers as “must-haves.”

2. Prioritizing Strategy

Marketing should own three key drivers of strategy: customer insights that should enable growth initiatives and be the basis for strategic resource allocation, the value proposition or the key to strategy, and the brand strategy that should both inform and enable the business strategy.

3. Fostering Collaboration and Eliminating Silos

Firms no longer have the luxury to see opportunities for consistency and synergy lost. It is especially important to overcome functional silos and create integrated marketing programs where some functional areas accept a supporting role, even when that is not what they are accustomed to.

4. Injecting Energy into Brands

Brand equity across the world has been declining for over a decade. The exceptions are those brands with energy. Energy is imperative. If a brand cannot provide product energy like Apple, Dove, Hyundai and others have done, their need is to create or find something with energy and attach the brand to it.

5. Creating a Clear Marketing Approach

With the fragmentation of media options, the dynamics of social media and the proliferation of brands and offerings, there is much clutter and complexity. Nothing less than great marketing and exceptional offerings will break a brand out. This means marketing needs access to creative tools, people willing to innovate and a broad array of marketing modalities.

“Nothing less than great marketing and exceptional offerings will break a brand out.”


FINAL THOUGHTS

There are many more solutions to these challenges, but if marketing can influence or deliver real innovation, a marketing-influenced business strategy, control of the silos, energy and involvement and great tactical marketing, it will be relevant to the organization and see success in the marketplace.

This post originally appeared on Harvard Business Review’s blog . For more of my HBR blog posts, click here.

Your network connection is offline.

caret-downcloseexternal-iconfacebook-logohamburgerinstagramlinkedinpauseplaythreads-icontwitterwechat-qrcodesina-weibowechatxing