The New Marketing Playbook for Driving Profitable Growth

Today’s Marketer has a tough job, caught between CEO’s and Boards demanding greater and more measurable returns on investment and empowered consumers re-shaping a once-familiar media landscape into new and treacherous terrain. As the economy sputters and profits flatten, executives, now more than ever, need to identify and cultivate sustainable growth opportunities, and marketing must be the key lever for doing so. The fundamental (and accelerating) shift in the market underscores that customers (not marketers) are controlling where, when, and how they listen to and act upon information. In many markets, customer segments are fragmenting and exhibiting significant variation in how they use information to make purchase decisions.

The proliferation of new media outlets and marketing channels, combined with the power that consumers now wield, has changed the fundamental rules and playbook of marketing. Heads of marketing now face a complex set of challenges and choices: how to optimize online marketing, social networks, narrowcast media, mobile advertising, podcasts, broadband video, and user-generated content. No wonder the typical CMO lasts less than 18 months in an organization. Most companies struggle with the transition to a more modern view of what “go-to-market” strategy means, in a world where the customer is not just king, and queen, but also in effect the co-owner of your brand.

Improving marketing effectiveness in this new reality means going beyond simply building awareness to include understanding and influencing customer behavior at specific points in the buying process. The challenge starts with how to determine the right investment mix between new and traditional marketing channels. Ultimately, it points to the question of how to engage consumers in a networked world. This implies an expanded definition of innovation. It’s about identifying (or creating) new ways to use media and marketing to make customer experience a source of differentiation and advantage.