State of Marketing 2020

Prior to coronavirus, brands and marketers already had to adapt to customer journeys taking place across a growing number of channels, but the speed and magnitude of the change required are now vastly bigger

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By: Morag Cuddeford-Jones

Download Salesforce’s ‘State of Marketing’ 2020 report

By Steve Hemsley

Taking the customer voice to the boardroom That impetus must be recognised and felt in all areas of a business and a marketing organisation. Direct Line has extensive customer experience metrics in place, for example, and marketers’ bonuses are dependent on achieving those metrics. “We have six customer experience pillars, or imperatives, which we know drive [net promoter score and financial outcomes], and these form the blueprint for any customer journey work,” says Evans. At Specsavers, his fellow Top 100 member, CMO Katherine Whitton, says that there has been a significant change in the role that marketing plays in the company over the last 18 months. “You know there has been a cultural shift in an organisation when departments which haven’t historically been deemed to be at the heart of a discipline start to get invited to meetings, and I would say marketing is pretty much always at the table when it comes to customer experience.”

Nina Bibby, CMO of O2 and another Top 100 marketer, agrees. She says marketing brings the voice of the customer into the boardroom to propose what is next in terms of product, proposition and customer experience. This approach has allowed O2 to build its Custom Plans and flexible contracts and, at the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis, “to work across functions to ensure that those customers who were most at risk of being disconnected, based on previous purchase behaviour, were given extra minutes and data to ensure they stayed connected.” Leading by inspiring Salesforce’s ‘State of Marketing’ report found that 88% of marketing respondents from ‘high performing’ companies lead customer experience initiatives across their organisations, and Whitton says this is to be expected. She says marketing leaders of this kind tend “to have a vision, create a strategy, and execute a plan; and to inspire others to join” and that “they are probably the best thought and people leaders”. Similarly, they need to be able to identify and crystallise customer experience initiatives effectively. As Steve Challouma, UK general manager at Bird’s Eye and a Top 100 marketer, says: “They need to be able to analyse data and make a business case for investment and change, and then package their ideas up in a compelling way to sell it to both internal and external stakeholders, and mobilise organisational resources to execute effectively.” Data provides context to change Today’s marketers are also expected to be data-savvy, and with Covid-19 causing such sudden and fluctuating change in the way we live and work, data analysis has taken on arguably greater importance. Data is integral to capturing, organising and activating the insights that foster the seamless journeys demanded by customers. However, according to the 'State of Marketing' report, two of respondents' top five challenges globally are 'unifying customer data sources' and 'sharing a unified view of customer data across business units'. These issues need urgent attention, but improving the situation starts with identifying the data trends of most consequence to an organisation. Whitton says Specsavers has been trying to gauge the shifts in consumer behaviour following the impact of the pandemic, and to be adaptive, as well as trying to anticipate whether behavioural changes will be long-term. The company noticed a significant increase in search topics relating to eye health, particularly red eye and conjunctivitis, as there was some early uncertainty about whether conjunctivitis was linked to Covid-19. “We started to track the increase in search and search terms and build out real-time content, and the traffic to our site looking for information grew by 200%. The insight was that people wanted knowledge and care,” Whitton adds. Digital slips into a new gear The acceleration of digital uptake has been one of the overwhelming changes prompted by Covid-19. New cohorts have begun to transact and interact digitally, perhaps unwillingly at first, yet discovering the efficiency of the channel. Evans says he has seen a mammoth shift towards digitisation, adding: “Some businesses thought they had three years for digital transformation and suddenly realised they had three weeks. That is a core part of marketers’ role - how do we stay relevant for the way customers want to access us?”

Online accounted for around 12% of Birds Eye’s sales before the pandemic, but this has now doubled as retailers have rapidly expanded their capacity, while a growing number of consumers have fast-tracked adoption of online shopping out of necessity. “Habits such as this have a high chance of sticking for some consumers, so ensuring that the channel is resourced accordingly in terms of focus will become increasingly important,” says Challouma. As the uptake of digital channels quickens, it is even more imperative for marketers to understand the customer’s full journey. Salesforce’s report states that hardly any marketers now describe themselves as ‘being detached from any given stage of the customer journey’. This relies on greater collaboration with departments such as sales, ecommerce and customer service. Collaboration is king Challouma says: “You are only as strong as your weakest link, and identifying which weak spots exist can provide opportunities for marketers to increase the impact of their brand across the mix and generate growth. It’s therefore imperative that marketers work closely with broader commercial departments from category management, shopper marketing, sales and ecommerce.” Evans says the pandemic has accelerated collaboration at Direct Line, as 11,000 employees transferred from offices to home working. “Otherwise the risks were pretty clear - to disappoint customers,” says Evans. “If the left hand and right hand are disjointed it’s pretty dangerous. If you want to deliver channel-led choice to customers, those choices need to add up.” He says that collaboration was facilitated by having commercial figures to reinforce the business case. “We have seen that there is a direct correlation between NPS and retention, which is critical for the insurance business model. If a customer scores us a zero and someone else a 10, retention [for the latter] is actually on average 15% higher, which is absolutely enormous. That is the glue [that holds the business case together]. If it was just on a conceptual basis you might struggle to get collaboration, but when it is clearly commercial, it joins up.” At O2, marketers often act in the role of orchestrators, bringing functions together to deliver on behalf of customers. “Working this way has allowed us to be agile in how we deliver customer benefits during the pandemic – we’ve donated over 400 million minutes to those who really need them, and offered over 3 million gigabytes of data to our NHS frontline workers too,” says Bibby. Some shifts in consumer behaviour will be short-term, others will remain. Marketers must be at the forefront of the longer-term shifts, which relies on monitoring changing customer preferences, being agile, and rapidly innovating to redesign journeys. As Evans says: “The time for leadership through marketing is now.”■ Click here to download Salesforce's 2020 'State of Marketing' report.

“Marketing is pretty much always at the table when it comes to customer experience”

Katherine Whitton, Specsavers