A new IBM study finds that chief marketing officer's (CMOs) feel unprepared to manage the impact of social media, channel and device choices and the current data explosion, all viewed as game changers for their organisations.
The 2011 IBM Global Chief Marketing Officer Study, assessing the responses of 1,734 CMOs in 19 industries and 64 countries, found that while 82% of CMOs said they planned to increase their use of social media over the next three to five years, only 26% were currently tracking blogs, 42% tracked third party reviews and 48% tracked consumer reviews to help shape their marketing strategies.
“The inflection point created by social media represents a permanent change in the nature of customer relationships,” said Carolyn Heller Baird, CRM research lead for the IBM Institute for Business Value and the global director of the study.
“Approximately 90% of all the real-time information being created today is unstructured data. CMOs who successfully harness this new source of insight will be in a strong position to increase revenues, reinvent their customer relationships and build new brand value.”
The research also revealed that the measures used to evaluate marketing were changing said Nicholas Maweni, marketing communications executive for IBM SA. “Nearly two-thirds of CMOs think return on marketing investment will be the primary measure of the marketing function's effectiveness by 2015.
“While they identify customer intimacy as a top priority, and recognise the impact of real-time data supplementing traditional methods of channel marketing and gathering market feedback, most CMOs still practice 20th century approaches.” added Maweni. 80% or more of the CMOs surveyed were still focusing primarily on traditional sources of information such as market research and competitive benchmarking, and 68% rely on sales campaign analysis to make strategic decisions.
According to IBM, each day we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data - so much that 90% of the world's data today was created in the last two years alone.
The difficulty, according to IBM, was how to analyse the vast quantities of data to extract the meaningful insights, and use them effectively to improve products, services and the customer experience.
Social media has enabled anyone to become a publisher, broadcaster and critic. Facebook had more than 750 million active users, with the average user posting 90 pieces of content a month. Twitter users send about 140 million tweets a day, while YouTube's 490 million users uploaded more video content in a 60-day period than the three major US television networks created in 60 years.
“Marketers are using social platforms to communicate - with 56% of CMOs viewing social media as a key engagement channel - but they still struggle with capturing valuable customer insight from the unstructured data that customers and potential customers produce,” IBM said.
The technology group said that the growing number of new marketing channels and devices, from smart phones to tablets, was quickly becoming a priority for CMOs.
Mobile commerce was expected to reach US$31 billion by 2016, representing a compound annual growth rate of 39% from 2011 to 2016. Meanwhile, the tablet market was expected to reach nearly 70 million units worldwide by the end of this year, growing to 294 million units by 2015.
Shifting new global markets and the influx of younger generations with different patterns of information access and consumption were also changing the face of the marketplace. In India, as one example, the middle class was expected to soar from roughly 5% of the population to more than 40% in the next two decades.
“To meet these new challenges, CMOs must boost their own digital, technological and financial proficiency - but many seem surprisingly reticent in this respect,” IBM said.
When asked which attributes they would need to be personally successful over the next three to five years, only 28% said technological competence, 25% said social media expertise and 16% said financial acumen. - I-Net Bridge