My name’s Emma and I have a problem
“I’m creative and inquisitive. I want to be inspired and inspiring. I love big ideas and delivering huge impact through my work. I am Emma – a marketing hero.”
Marketing is full of people like Emma – no matter their gender, age or background. Marketing is a discipline that celebrates great ideas, enthusiasm and innovation. But there is a problem: the traditional business of marketing doesn’t really reflect the passion and talent of the people who work in it.
Let’s face it, most marketing departments spend a lot of time dealing with stuff that has very little to do with marketing and customer engagement: managing suppliers; contracts; procurement; asset management; policing the brand; and dealing with unrealistic business expectations within unrealistic timeframes.
Marketers such as Emma are struggling with siloed operations, fragmented systems and digital transformation. At the same time, global marketing budgets are under pressure, and marketers are constantly being turned to as the champions of the new world of omnichannel customer engagement. This has led to marketing receiving an intense level of attention and scrutiny – having to constantly prove a return on investment.
Marketing has become fixated with, and paralysed by, process – and Emmas don’t get into marketing to do that. You can hear more about Emma and the challenges faced by modern marketers in the embedded video. We at ITG believe the solution to the problem doesn’t lie in spinning the wheels faster, but in automating and streamlining the processes that have little to do with the job of marketing in the first place.
But we also want to hear what you think. And that is why ITG has teamed up with The Drum to hold a debate about how marketing can reclaim its creative roots.
Our event: When Marketers Aren’t Marketers, will be held on 27th April 2016 at the Soho Hotel, London at 8:30am. On the panel will be ITG CEO Simon Ward, joined by Richard Jones of Marks & Spencer and Tina Kataria from SABMiller. Together, they will discuss how we are constraining our best and brightest marketing stars with unnecessary process and bureaucracy – and what we can do about it.
To register for the event please visit http://beat.thedrum.com/ITG-Breakfast.html
Jonathan Quayle, Media Centre Director, ITG
Web: www.inspiredthinkinggroup.com
Content by The Drum Network member:
Inspired Thinking Group
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