‘Soft’ skills like communication and empathy are clearly important, but marketers need to brush up on core technical skills like strategy, data and measurement to be truly effective.
When it comes to customer insight, all to often marketers go in knowing what they want the answer to be, but becoming a better questioner is a skill that can be learnt.
Small brands may have many of the same challenges as big brands, but growing a startup is about entrepreneurship and sales, not marketing strategy.
The transformation of the economic and cultural landscape means the notion of value is changing and a very different era for marketers awaits.
While the vast majority of top talent doesn’t work at your company, there are ways to tap into their knowledge and marketers are well-placed to help businesses see the benefits.
Data-driven marketing drives results, proves value and delivers insight, but don’t fall into the trap of thinking it can’t be used to enhance creativity too.
There is potential for artificial intelligence to be used in advertising – particularly copywriting – as it has a very definite pattern and structure, but AI-created ads are unlikely to win any awards for creativity just yet.
Beware of letting the tail wag the dog: technology is integral to modern marketing but tools are no replacement for strategy.
Scale, speed and convenience give Chinese brands a lead over their UK counterparts in customer experience – and they’re starting to leave us behind.
Agile might be a much derided buzzword but when marketers take their cues from software developers and begin to work in an ‘agile’ way it can offer big benefits to ways of working.
The move from 4G to 5G has been likened to the shift from typewriter to computer and it will have profound impacts on businesses, consumers and marketing.
Landing customers with unexpected price hikes and made-up fees might increase revenues in the short term but the long-term damage could be devastating.
Black Friday may seem like a big event in the UK retail calendar but it cannot compete with the sheer scale of Alibaba’s Singles’ Day, which racked up more than £24bn in sales this year and is rapidly becoming a key strategic plank of brands’ plans.
The future of marketing study must still focus on a grounding in strategic principles, while the hands-on teaching of tactical tools must be constantly updated.
Direct-to-consumer brands are shaking up the consumer goods market by owning the whole customer experience, rather than simply the product, and there are aspects of how they operate that all brands could learn from.