With increased information overload through the many devices we have in our hands and fingertips these days, having a clear understanding of your brand’s values that is easily understood by your most valuable assets, your customers, staff and suppliers; is key to remain relevant and grow as a business and brand.
The important of positioning one of the ‘P’s’ of the traditional marketing ‘5 P’s’ is now even more relevant than in the past. Especially if a brand wants to dominate a certain market opportunity that its competitors have not capitalised on.
Positioning and more recently the ability to quickly reposition a brand is what the future of marketing in an increasing technologically connected age is rests on.
Marketing no longer is a brand controlled space, as the internet opened up a dialogue between consumers with brands, where a consumer with a large network of influence can hold a brand’s equity at ransom should the brands promise not be delivered on. Yes, a classic case of the ‘tail wagging the dog’.
Marketing in the future will open the doors for more specialist roles. Currently this role has been labelled digital and generally been outsourced to IT companies or marketing agencies to handle. Companies need to understand that they are outsourcing future capabilities and relinquishing control of their most valuable future asset, their data. Now that is a scary realisation.
In the future, it will be how an organisation structures their IT, marketing and CRM departments together that will be integral in their future success. The silo’ed business will prove to be inefficient, whereas the integrated business with an empowered team with the mandate and resources to execute will flourish.
In theory this sounds logical, but in practice it will need strong vision and leadership and I believe a new role in the form of a CIO (chief information officer) who will be a hybrid role of a both a chief marketing officer (CMO) and chief technology officer (CTO) to drive this change.
This will require a proactive business approach as oppose to a reactive one.
Organisations with a lot of vision and confidence will be champions of this new level of organisational thought leadership.
Marketing in the future will be like trading on the stock exchange.
Marketers will have a dashboard with triggers to track and execute marketing ‘trades’ in the form of ‘campaigns’ that will ensure that their brand equity, market share and sales grow exponentially. These ‘trades’ will have been formulated based on data and scenarios pre-defined. The system will operate with its own ‘brand algorithm’ which over time will get strong and more responsive and predictive as it gets fed more data.
I have begun to believe that competition is a ‘positioning’ problem and as marketers we should pioneer and creating new categories for our consumers.
Now that you know what the future of marketing will entail, what are your doing to position your brand, empower your consumers and business to capitalise on the future?
I look forward to engaging with you further on this exciting journey.
Will Green is the CEO of Apurimac Media. @WillJNGreen or follow @ApurimacMediaSA
