Doing More With Less

Viewpoint by Cindy Levine, Partner

We continually hear marketers frustrated with and challenged by increased demands to demonstrate the value of their marketing efforts, while also dealing with shrinking marketing budgets. While a primary response to this challenge has been to seek out increasingly more sophisticated analytics to "demonstrate value," we'd also argue that there's another way to think about the issue. At the most basic level, this is about ensuring alignment between strategic business objectives and the customer experience. Brand managers (in the broadest definition) far too often rely on the marketing communications tools in their arsenal and forget that the most critical brand-building components happen much closer to the customer — their experiences at point of sale, product delivery, and post-purchase service. Marketers need to collaborate with their peers outside marketing to optimize the entire experience chain, ensure alignment with corporate strategies ... and ultimately do more with more.