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- John Quelch, Harvard Business School Marketing Professor
Marketing is in the midst of a revolutionary change that challenges the definition and future of the marketing function. At stake is the opportunity to restore marketing to the art of driving business results based on the science of understanding and adding value to current and future customers.
Four key drivers are at the heart of this marketing revolution:
Marketing executives, their teams and their vendors must work together to prove ROI, integrate with new channels, and engage customers in intelligent conversations.
To address these revolutionary changes, we’ve worked with our customers and other marketers around the globe to define The Imperatives of the Marketing Revolution – which outline changes that need to occur to drive marketing forward. These Ten Imperatives are the result of a community project that started at an event 6 months ago in San Antonio, Texas and continues as we expand our community and encourage input.
Together, we as marketers can combine our voices to discuss these challenges and the changes we are enacting in our own departments. We invite you to join us in conversation!
Marketing must be accountable and lead this revolution--the accountability must start with marketing before driving change across the rest of the organization. As marketing organizations worldwide are being forced to do more with less, they must at the same time become more nimble and able to respond quickly in today’s digital marketing environment. Read more
The Chief Marketing Officer’s role in the revolution must be one of innovation and thought leadership. This leadership must stretch from the boardroom to the back office of marketing operations and across the public sphere of the external marketplace. Read more
As marketers, we must realize that consumers are able to exert control over our brand. The challenge is to let go and embrace new channels, value increased exposure, and harness social media’s potential –while recognizing that the messages we create and release will be interpreted and commented on in ways that we cannot control. Read more
The days of one-way monologues at customers are long-gone. Marketers today must engage customers with conversations, solicit and act on customer feedback, and deliver experiences that are personalized, just-in-time, and relevant. Read more
Imperative 5 Free Your Content:How are marketers responding to these new customer expectation? In Imperative 5: Free Your Content, hear directly from industry leaders about the new Imperative for content creation and distribution, and learn from leading brands how they are leveraging new forms of content to drive customer conversations. Read more
#6: Integrate to Innovate Online and Offline. While digital marketing is on the rise, customers are still responding as much as ever to traditional channels. The need for today’s marketers to integrate traditional marketing channels with digital is a crucial element for success. Read more
#7: Be Mobile. Be Everywhere. Be Relevant. Mobile marketing is right now, it’s ubiquitous, and it’s here to stay. To be successful, today’s marketers must capitalize on mobile opportunities—to ignore mobile channels is to flirt with failure. Read more
#8: Tear Down the Silos. Monolithic, function-based groups working in isolation within your organization may be traditional, but are no longer optimal with the slippery slope that marketers tread between relevance and irrelevance. Today’s marketers need to, instead, tear down the silos and embrace a dynamic environment. Read more
#9: Automate the Science of Marketing. Marketing may be an art, but to succeed, marketers need the right tools to help them execute. Today, that means turning to your greatest ally—technology—and automating marketing processes so that you can focus on killer campaigns. Read more
#10: Be Maniacal, Prove ROI. While marketers are embracing and adapting to an explosion of new digital and social media channels with grace under pressure, proving ROI in this evolving marketing landscape remains a nagging headache. But it is critical in demonstrating how great you really are. Read more
