Pizza Hut has sold Football Shoes, Taco Bell has a hotel, McDonald’s sells more toys than any other
retailer in the world and Coca Cola clothing can be see just about everyday in
every country of the world. Recently, the chief marketing officers (CMOs) of these big consumer goods companies
have achieved phenomenal success in recent years. They achieved the marketing
holy grail of embedding their brands at the center of their consumers’ everyday
lives and built titan reputations in the process.
The consumers are about to change all of
that according to Steven Johnson, Grocerant Guru® at Tacoma, WA
based Foodservice Solutions®. While large legacy consumer brands that have long set the standards for the industry are
no longer untouchable. Today consumers are
evolving faster than the most legacy brands is search of the next big thing, flavour,
or meal and the uncurrent of brand discontent is rising.
Laura
Gurski is senior managing director of Accenture's consumer goods
and services practice and oversees the development and delivery of marketing,
customer service, commerce and sales transformation services she recently wrote
an article focused on: Looking Beyond
the Marketing Basics here is some of what she had to say that we found important:
“But being
brilliant at the basics won’t be enough in the long run. A different approach
from the CMO is now required to support a “living business”—one that can sense
and respond to fluctuating consumer and market demands. And corporate leaders
increasingly expect more from the marketing function. Accenture’s
research shows 52% of consumer goods CEOs now hold their
CMOs responsible for driving disruptive growth.
So CMOs must find
a way to free themselves from their organizational shackles and devote more of
their time to creating new relevance
at scale to drive value and growth for the business. They
have vital skill sets which will help ensure their organizations can
continuously adapt to evolving customer needs, providing “hyper-relevant” experiences
that deliver just what the consumer needs, just when they need it.
Meeting Consumers
on Their Terms
The need to
deliver personalized experiences and tailored marketing is becoming ever more
pressing as a means of building consumer relationships for the long haul. Look
at how the craft brewing sector is cleverly infusing “relevance” into its
products. Intelligent
Brewing Co. is a great example. This innovative brand
invites consumers to weigh in on beer flavors and carbonation levels via its
website. This crowdsourced insight is then fed back into the brand’s algorithm
to produce continuously refined and personalized beer recipes at scale, with
the resulting brews shipped monthly to subscribers. That’s consumer relevance
on a whole new scale.
We have also seen
a wave of direct-to-consumer brands shake up the market by offering customers
new experiences, as well as individually tailored products and services.
Consider how Mink’s technology
lets customers 3D-print self-designed makeup at home. Or how hair
care brand Function
of Beauty created 54 trillion possible formulations
so that consumers can select a product to meet their individual “hair goals.”
Updating the
Marketing ‘Tool Belt’
To achieve this
kind of responsiveness, CMOs will need to bring new and enhanced strategies into
play—platform thinking, silo busting, cutting-edge AI and analytics. These are
the tools that leaders will use to build the titan reputations of tomorrow.
But many CMOs
today are still being held back by legacy systems and processes—significantly
more so than in other industries. Six out of 10 told Accenture they were unable
to develop the more agile, dynamic organizations and operating models required
in today’s fast-changing environment. And two-thirds of CMOs cited a lack of
critical technology and tools as a top barrier to improving performance.
Focus on Getting
to Growth
Transforming an
entire marketing organization is no easy task. But by focusing on three key
areas, CMOs can prepare their teams—and their companies—to thrive. They are:
·
Centering the entire business around growth, ensuring
the organization can adapt and respond, not to where its customers are today,
but to where they’ll be tomorrow. It means working across the organization to
upgrade operating models and shape a far more consumer-centric culture.
·
Preparing to let go of traditional and familiar
technologies. Modern, adaptable backend systems will deliver the agility that
smaller, newer competitors are already enjoying. And technologies such
as AI, analytics, and the internet of things will open new operating
models and create different and much more personalized product and service
innovation to serve consumers across a variety of channels.
·
Being ready to reimagine roles and ways of working.
Taking inspiration from leaders who are moving away from vertical static
structures to more flexible groups of multidisciplinary “pods”—small teams
brought together to solve specific problems. And planning for entirely
different kinds of skill sets, such as “immersive experience
designers,” “storytellers,” “growth hackers” and
“futurologists”—just some of the new types of talent CMOs said they expect to
need in the years to come.
Finding the
Freedom to Reinvent
The reality is
there’s no longer any part of the business that isn’t impacted by marketing in
some way. And the expectations on CMOs are growing significantly as a result.
They must
therefore ensure they give themselves the freedom to take on this expanded
role, balancing the need to deliver the marketing basics brilliantly and
cost-effectively with the need to help the whole business drive real growth.
Foodservice Solutions® specializes in
outsourced business development. We can help you identify, quantify and qualify
additional food retail segment opportunities or a new menu product segment and
brand and menu integration strategy. Foodservice Solutions® of Tacoma WA is the global leader in the Grocerant niche
visit Facebook.com/Steven Johnson, www.Linkedin.com/in/grocerant/ or www.twitter.com/grocerant/
