Influence: Difficult to obtain, easy to lose
Influence has been a prominent feature on Marketingweek.co.uk this past week. Growing influence to ensure your voice as a marketer is heard in your business to be precise.
A report from the Chartered Institute of Marketing illustrated that marketers’ influence is often lacking.
CIM’s latest quarterly Marketing Confidence Monitor found fewer than half (45 per cent) of UK marketers have guaranteed involvement in the development of new products and services. Almost a third (30 per cent) reported a low or no chance in being involved in the development of corporate strategy and one in five (20 per cent) said they were unlikely to be involved in significant changes to customer service or the wider customer experience.
It is a concern that marketers feel so shut out. Help, however, was at hand in the form of BMW’s director for brand management Steven F Althaus. Speaking at this year’s Cannes Lion festival, Althaus called for the marketing industry to get closer to the heart of business by ditching irrelevant metrics and thinking in general management terms.
Sage advice. Marketers have been guilty in the past of doing what Althaus described as “putting lipstick on gorillas rather than telling the truth.”
That is not to say you are guilty of untruths, just not speaking in the stark, commercially focussed terms that everyone outside of the marketing department can understand.
Presenting the nuts and bolts of direct marketing to peers is often an easier job than it is for those presenting the case and the whys and the wherefores of other channels, being that it is about direct return on marketing investment. The rise of social, mobile and other online channels as a means to directly sell to consumers and the sheer volume of data and data sources now available have presented new challenges, however.
Marketing Week Live, taking place at the Olympia Grand in London on the 26th and 27th June, provides lots of insight and opportunity for you to navigate through this landscape. Those in attendance will hear from the great and good of the marketing industry on how to maximise data, how to analyse social media and how to measure social media ROI at the data and digital conference.
Elsewhere, essential intelligence on insight and customer loyalty can be found.
To find out more about attending and what you can enjoy click here.
