Top 100 marketers’ priorities in 2020 Top 100 marketers’ priorities in 2020

Marketing Week asked members of our Top 100 marketers list for their views on which consumer and industry trends will set the marketing agenda in 2020

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Title of the piece

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Lorem ipsum ergo sum this is a caption blurb about the article.

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SOURCE: SALESFORCE, 'STATE OF MARKETING 2019'

By: Morag Cuddeford-Jones

“Personalisation is key to try and get cut through.”

David Hilbert, Kia

Source: SALESFORCE

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According to Toombs, the new brand positioning stems from a technology-led transformation that started in 2015. Before that, MoneySuperMarket had three main challenges: “Low sophistication of our CRM, meaning we were sending high-volume, single transactional emails prioritising revenue over relevance. Secondly we were email-only focused, meaning we weren’t using the multiple channels we could have to engage customers. And limited in-house capabilities: we just didn’t have the skills in-house to help us achieve our ambitions of greater personalisation.” The story at GoCompare, as relayed by Carl Chessum, group CRM director of the brand’s owner GoCo Group, was a similar one. An ever more competitive marketplace was driving the need to change. “We wanted to put the customer at the heart of our success and make sure that we can offer savings as a service, which we believe every customer should be a part of and be able to enjoy.” The “mantra is helping people to find the right products, saving them time and saving them money”, and that has manifested in the launch of a new brand, Weflip, which automatically switches customers to new energy deals when a cheaper one becomes available. GoCo also acquired MyVoucherCodes and Energylinx; and has invested in Salesforce Marketing Cloud technology, as has MoneySuperMarket. As part of their respective strategy changes, both companies have adapted the ways they contact customers and use data to manage those relationships. According to Chessum, there have been numerous tangible benefits for GoCompare.

2017

2018

2019

Median number of data sources used by financial services marketing organisations

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use of ai among financial service marketers

Currently use AI

49%

Plan to use AI within the next two years

+141%

Projected growth rate of AI use over the next two years

35%

Source: SALESFORCE

He argues: “It enables you to really focus on and develop these muscles. We can have a whole team that’s devoted to predictive analytics, and improving that and getting better at it, and then understanding how it can be used more broadly in the business.” Another key priority is to ensure data projects have valuable outcomes beyond just insights, he says: “Rather than doing analytics for the sake of analytics and maybe having a nice PowerPoint at the end of it, the whole idea is when you’re doing your project, is there an asset you can leave behind that can be repurposed or reused?” For example, Barclays has used its analytics capabilities to create segmentations based on where customers’ spending behaviour clusters around particular brands. This has created new insights on brand behaviour that Barclays can offer to corporate clients. Hardy explains: “We looked at our customers’ transactional behaviour and we looked at the brands that they spend on, and then we looked at the interaction between those brands – so if someone spends at brand X they are also likely to spend at brand Y. Then we performed some clustering around those brands and found which travelled together, and are better explained together than apart.”

Barclays also used anonymised card transaction data to find ways to serve its most valuable customers better in branches. The analysis showed affluent customers were more likely to be in the area around a branch later in the day, which led to the bank extending opening hours to allow them to come into the premises. A third application of analytics was to examine the catchment areas for particular stores using similar transaction data, for the benefit of clients in the retail and restaurant sectors. This has enabled those clients to work out how far consumers are willing to travel to visit a store, so they can see which existing stores have overlapping catchments and where they might be able to access a new market by opening a new store. This type of innovation around data has not been common for big, established financial services companies. Indeed, for many, the need to protect legacy business models has actively held it back. But as Aviva’s UK retail and brand director Tom Daniell told Marketing Week recently, “if customers believe we are innovating on their behalf, that’s a real driver of trust”.

The brand’s new AvivaPlus subscription product has been designed to reward loyal customers with the best price, rather than giving new customers the best deals and implicitly penalising those already with the brand. It has required a new product development model and was only possible because the company switched towards more agile working, where teams responsible for communications, data, media, proposition, product, customer experience, pricing and risk all sit together. According to Daniell: “This isn’t about putting a veneer over an existing product. This is grassroots up, absolutely a new product that fundamentally behaves economically for us in a different way but also behaves in a different way for customers.” It also means there is consistency in the customer journey, from marketing messages through to purchase and call centre service. Customer satisfaction and net promoter scores are already higher than for Aviva’s standard insurance product, following a soft launch. This is the kind of service consumers now expect – even from monolithic financial services organisations. The whole sector now needs to move just as fast as new digital entrants in order to keep up. ■

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Unilever’s former chief marketing and communications officer Keith Weed left his role before the Top 100 list was named, but has been ever-present in rankings of the world’s most influential marketers for many years. Now, as a non-executive director for companies including WPP, he sees mobile phones continuing to transform the way consumers and brands interact in 2020. Weed says: “I know [the smartphone] has been around for a while, but I still think it's got a long way to go. Of course, with a mobile you have a real-time, in-location ability to connect with people and indeed to personalise as well. Unlocking that, I think, will be the biggest opportunity still ahead of us.” A key aspect of this, he believes, is voice, which he sees as a “more human” way for brands to communicate, and with greater “fluidity”. He may have a point, if forecasts from analysts at Juniper Research are accurate. It predicts 8 billion voice assistants will be in use by 2023, up from 2.5 billion at the end of 2018 – most of them being on smartphones, for example Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri. While different sectors and brands will undoubtedly have different priorities next year, there are few better sources of wisdom that the Marketing Week Top 100 for insight into what’s next for the marketing discipline as a whole. ■

MoneySuperMarket's new 'Get money calm' positioning has been enabled by a more personalised customer relationship

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Remote collaboration

Medichecks marketing director Amanda Howard singles out the rise of collaboration tools as a transformative influence on ways of working. As a result, marketers and agencies no longer need to be in the same room to work closely together. “Through things like [Microsoft] Teams and Zoom and virtual working, I think collaboration has become that much easier, and that means that you can get the best people to work with you. They don't have to be physically based in your city or even in your country.” It’s a reality marketers need to become comfortable with, as research shows this is the clear direction of travel for working practices generally. According to the Office for National Statistics, the number of people in the UK who work from home increased by 22% in the decade between 2008 and 2018 to 4.5 million.

Getting a grip on personal data

Making personalisation feel premium

Despite Wheldon’s qualms about data protection, fellow Top 100 member David Hilbert, marketing director at Kia UK, sees personalisation playing a fundamental role for marketers next year “Personalisation is key from a marketing point of view to try and get cut through,” he argues. He also believes the ability to tailor messages is key to creating differentiation from competitors, throughout the customer journey from online advertising onwards. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence to indicate marketers and tech vendors see the challenge of contextual personalisation at scale as one of the next great marketing challenges. As numerous speakers at the Festival of Marketing attested, the key is to understand each consumer’s individual intent when interacting with a brand, then adapt the journeys they are able to take accordingly – all while respecting increasingly stringent data laws.

Breaking down customer silos

Achieving this ideal in personalisation requires progress in other areas first. Vivienne Francis, former marketing director of the Alzheimer’s Society and currently a consultant, says the elimination of silos is her key trend for 2020. Specifically, there is a need to ensure different parts of a business share customer data, with the aim of ensuring customer journeys and experiences take all touchpoints into account. “In some organisations you can you have a tendency for certain groups to think they own certain audiences. I think all of those internal barriers need to be let go,” she argues. The ultimate goal of this effort is to ensure consumers have the experience they want to have with a brand, thus making them more likely to keep returning.

Unlocking the potential of voice on mobile

Royal Bank of Scotland Group CMO David Wheldon points to data as a key theme once again in 2020. He is positive about the potential of technology but also counsels marketers to respect consumers’ rights. “I think, on the one hand, it’s great to see lots of technology, hypothetically, enabling all sorts of things. But on the other, we need to remember this is people’s data we’re talking about, and we’re miles off personalisation that customers will actually value and treasure because there’s way too much abuse at the moment,” he says. It’s understandable that, as a FTSE 100 company with around 19 million customers globally, RBS’s top marketer should be risk-averse where their data is concerned – especially given the fines handed out to British Airways and Marriott under GDPR in 2019. Could 2020 be the year when the Information Commissioner’s Office finally gives marketers a clearer idea of what’s acceptable and what’s not in the realms of personal data use?

TOP100 hOME

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methodology

analysis

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