The Five Biggest Challenges Facing Marketing, and How to Face Them

The marketing field is faced with several challenges that for many firms will require transformation in capability and charge. Among them are the following five.

1. Marketing needs to lead in substantial or transformational innovation that will result in new offerings that define new categories or subcategories. 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. Marketing needs to be strategic rather than tactical and needs to earn an influential place at the executive table. 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. Marketing needs to get control of the product, country and functional silos to foster cooperation and communication rather than competition and isolation.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. Marketing needs to inject energy and involvement into their brands. Brand equity across the world has been declining for over a decade. The exceptions are those brands with energy. Energy is an 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. Marketing needs to be elevate its game tactically.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.

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.

Posted February 1, 2012 / Permalink / Subscribe (e-mail) / Subscribe (RSS)

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Comments

Would add marketing needs to show CEOs, CFOs and investors objective ROI, measured steady improvement over time, deep consumer and customer insight and knowledge of marketing science [what has measurably worked and why.] The last is not a barrier to creativity but an informed starting point for it.

— Added by Billbyte on February 2, 2012

Absolutely agree with the above. These challenges are big and certainly nothing a company can solve over night.

There are many things that will support the transformation. But the most practical approach will require courage to change, stamina, top management involvement, a long term strategy with quick wins built in to keep people motivated and, well some chocolate will never harm.

— Added by Kreativer Frechling on February 2, 2012

Billbyte, you could easily make the arguement that marketing analytics could for some firms be a key challenge as the related problem with dealing with the data explosion. But the five I picked are more widespread and strategic, in my view.

Kreativer, good thoughts, they echo many of the ideas from my CMO study reported in my book Spanning Silos.

— Added by David Aaker on February 2, 2012

Great reminder of the larger value-add of marketing. Too often marketing has become scientific demand management and prediction for existing categories. This focus meets the need of measuring ROI, but does little to grow revenue significantly and profitably. Unfortunately, as brand premiums decline in many categories, the CFO pushes too many marketing people into basically a sales lead-creation function, helping the C-Suite meeting quarterly earnings expectations.

— Added by Kay Plantes on February 2, 2012