CANNES – Marketing departments need to think more like business owners as opposed to captains or coaches if they want their businesses to grow. That’s one of the early findings in the latest iteration of Marketing2020, which is led by Kantar Vermeer and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), among others.
Kantar has been collaborating with the ANA to “make sense of all the changes that are happening at marketing organizations” around the world and come up with “some real levers that they can pull that we know have effect and go beyond somebody’s view of what works but actually is data-backed,” says the CMO of Kantar Consulting, Marc de Swaan Arons.
Marketing2020 is led by Kantar Vermeer in partnership with the ANA, Spencer Stuart, Forbes, MetrixLab and Adobe, as well as the World Federation of Advertisers and its organizations in China, Brazil, UK, Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, Turkey, and France.
In this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Arons talks about the impact of changes in consumer behavior and media fragmentation. “What we’re seeing is that there is growth, but it’s moving to very uncomfortable places for most of the established players,” he says.
Within consumer packaged-goods, known as FMCG in Europe, 90% of the growth over the last five years “has actually been driven by people outside the top 25. In other words, there is growth but it’s being pulled in by other players.”
Big, established companies are finding that their traditional models for marketing and sales are much less relevant in a world where consumers are choosing very personalized solutions and media is fragmenting, according to Arons.
“Our program is a research study that aims to give marketing and business leaders real practical tools” by January of 2019. The study will explain how growth over-performers differ in how they define growth “but also how they build growth strategy, organize for growth and how they build the new capabilities and combine those with the traditional capabilities of marketing and business.”
Early insight from 50 of about 500 interviews with business executives that will be conducted worldwide shows an evolving role for marketing. In the past it was the brand captain. Over the last few years, marketing “evolved into a role of almost the purpose coach, the marketing coach within the organization. Bringing alive the brand purpose, delivering solutions to consumers.
“We see a next step, which is really required, is for the marketers to evolve into the mindset of business owners. It’s all about now what drives growth in a business sense. What drives bottom and topline growth. What drives personal growth for your staff and how do we recruit the best people. It’s much more of an owner mindset.”
By moving from captain to coach to owner, “that’s when you have the invitation in the boardroom to really be a peer. If marketers are seen to be playing with brands with different metrics rather than the hard business metrics that everybody else on the board works with, they’re not part of the team and they’re not part of driving real growth strategy,” says Arons.
This video is part of a series produced by Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2018 about advertising accountability presented by Mediaocean. Please find more videos from this series here.
