The Great Marketing Declutter: are you a survivor, striver or thriver?
Marketers today face mounting pressure after a wave of unprecedented disruption. From changing customer needs to dealing with new ways of working, an explosion of new technology to grapple with, smaller budgets and bigger asks; it’s easy for marketers to lose focus and get lost in a clutter of priorities coming from all directions. For marketers to thrive in this new environment, they need to focus on what really matters, discard what doesn’t, and rewire the rest.
Marketing leaders need to understand if their team members are thrivers, strivers, or survivors
Nearly 70% of 1,000 senior marketing executives say the past year has completely exhausted their employees, according to research from Accenture. Yet a small group of them have been energized by a new purpose of servicing customers’ changing motivations.
In a new three-part video series, Michele McGrath, chief client officer, and Nina Holdaway, managing director, at Accenture UKI, discuss the three distinct groups of marketers identified in the research: the survivors, the strivers and the thrivers. Each faces its own unique challenges, so it’s critical for marketing leaders to recognize which group they fall into at any given point in time.
Watch part one of ‘The Great Marketing Declutter: are you surviving, striving, or thriving?’ above.
One in five CMOs (17%) are survivors – they are struggling, they are burnt out and feel out of step with changing consumer needs and desires.
Strivers, meanwhile, represent the majority (66%) – they have good intentions and want to make an impact, but don’t quite have all the tools and insights they need to do so. They have the will, but not the way.
Thrivers (17%) on the other hand, are outperforming the competition by some distance. They are all fired up and have grasped this new reality. They are rethinking the role of marketing by getting close to their customers, communicating and delivering in a very different way, changing their ways of working and putting purpose at the heart of their business.
With this greater sense of purpose, thrivers embrace positive change. More than half (59%) of them say their marketing organization is stronger now than in 2020, despite all the disruption caused by the pandemic. Key to this is decluttering the marketing function to focus on what really matters. By eliminating the non-essentials, organizations with a thriving CMO are performing 1.4x better than their peers in revenues and profitability.
For many marketing organizations, the question is where to start. Over the next two videos, Accenture’s McGrath and Holdaway talk to Ellie Norman, former director of marketing, Formula 1 and Dan Sherwood, marketing director, Santander, on how they are pushing their teams to think differently about marketing and take the lead on customer experience, to be able to thrive.
Like what you saw? Stay tuned for part two and part three of the ‘The Great Marketing Declutter’ video series in the coming weeks.
Content created with:
Accenture Birmingham
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