Industry leaders on future trends and the skills marketers will need to thrive
As the Festival of Marketing’s ‘Fast Forward’ conference draws near, speakers including Helen Edwards, Rory Sutherland and Just Eat CMO Susan O’Brien, explain how marketers should prepare themselves and their brands for the future.
The Festival of Marketing’s ‘Fast Forward’ event will take place across four days this June, offering insight into what marketers need to help grow their brands and bolster their careers in the years ahead. The event features CMOs from Unilever, Amazon and Just Eat, as well as thought leaders such as Rory Sutherland and Mark Ritson.
In anticipation, Marketing Week asked six speakers for their opinions on the future skills marketers will need, the trends that will define their roles in the coming months and how marketers can ensure their brands continue to thrive in the future.
Pete Markey, CMO, Boots
Q: What is the number one skill marketers will need to succeed in the coming months and years?
Marketers will need a deep appreciation of marketing effectiveness across the marketing mix, to help teams make smarter and better decisions to drive business performance.
Q: What one trend will most define how marketers do their job in the near future?
The growing number of opportunities emerging through first party data, to both better connect with audiences through owned and paid media, and to continue driving improved marketing effectiveness.
Q: What one thing can marketers do in future to ensure their brand thrives?
Stay in tune with your customers, with the role your brand plays in their lives and with what makes your brand unique and different. In other words, stay relevant.
Markey will join the CMOs of Habito and Lenovo on Tuesday 8 June to discuss whether it is possible to future-proof your marketing strategy.
Rory Sutherland, vice chairman, Ogilvy UK
Q: What is the number one skill marketers will need to succeed in the coming months and years?
Spare time. We are in danger of becoming too busy to be effective.
Q: What one trend will most define how marketers do their job in the near future?
Distributed productivity. The Zoom genie isn’t going back in the bottle.
Q: What one thing can marketers do in future to ensure their brand thrives?
Build mildly indiscriminate fame.
On Tuesday 8 June, Sutherland will be speaking about experimentation without exploitation, as well as other routes to future growth. A live Q&A will follow.
Susan O’Brien, CMO, Just Eat
Q: What is the number one skill marketers will need to succeed in the coming months and years?
Something I always say is to understand your audience. Don’t assume anything, be aware that we live in a marketing bubble and seldom are we the target market. We are overexposed to our products, competitors and our market. At best we are a consumer panel of one.
Find out what makes your consumer tick, what they think of your brand, what drives them to purchase, what they do with your product, what motivates them and what they think of your competitors. Then consider how best to reach them and balance short-term performance with longer-term brand building.
Q: What one trend will most define how marketers do their job in the near future?
Data! We all now have so much of it. Although it’s not about the data per se, but rather how you use it. How you analyse it and sort out the ‘nice to know’ from the critical. How you make it actionable and useful, and how you prioritise the insight it delivers. We all have to get better at that, otherwise we will drown in data and never get things done.
Q: What one thing can marketers do in future to ensure their brand thrives?
Be relevant. Know your brand’s place in people’s lives and the role that you play. Concentrate on what you do and what you genuinely stand for.
For us at Just Eat, this means being entertaining and perhaps bringing a little smile to people in how we promote ourselves. This was exemplified in our ‘Snoop’ campaign, which we ran in multiple markets during the height of the pandemic, and also our current footballing legends campaign, which promotes our sponsorship of the UEFA Euro 2020 tournament.
On Wednesday 8 June, O’Brien will reveal how Just Eat is prepping for growth during an interview with Marketing Week’s editor-in-chief, Russell Parsons. A live Q&A will follow.
Gael de Talhouet, vice-president of brand building, Essity
Q: What is the number one skill marketers will need to succeed in the coming months and years?
The capability to always continue learning.
Q: What one trend will most define how marketers do their job in the near future?
Change!
Q: What one thing can marketers do in future to ensure their brand thrives?
Stop listening to themselves. Marketers have to see the world through the eyes of consumers.
Talhouet will join the founder of gourmet popcorn brand Joe & Seph’s on Wednesday 9 June to discuss what SMEs and FMCG giants can learn from each other about innovation.
Helen Edwards, branding consultant and Marketing Week columnist
Q: What is the number one skill marketers will need to succeed in the coming months and years?
The ability to strategise at speed. The demand and ability to do things faster won’t go away, but it’s easy to be fast and wrong, and less easy to be fast and right.
Q: What one trend will most define how marketers do their job in the near future?
Hybrid lifestyles both inside and outside of work.
Q: What one thing can marketers do in future to ensure their brand thrives?
Concentrate on improving the experience of their brand’s product or service.
Edwards will join marketing and insight bosses from Santander, Reckitt and Pinterest on Wednesday 9 June to debate whether innovation always has to meet known customer needs.
Saj Arshad, chief innovation officer, Santander
Q: What is the number one skill marketers will need to succeed in the coming months and years?
Adaptability. The rules of marketing don’t change, but the tools to connect brands to customers do, and at a faster rate every year. We need to adapt our approach and use new data tools and technology to boost effectiveness for brands, and enhance experiences for consumers.
Q: What one trend will most define how marketers do their job in the near future?
Consent. Regulation and increasing consumer awareness mean that we can’t take reaching consumers for granted. They can increasingly block or avoid advertising, so brands need to make the case for customers to consent to being marketed to and show that customers will benefit from our communications.
Q: What one thing can marketers do in future to ensure their brand thrives?
We need to be there for our customers and make sure our brand and marketing is aligned to our purpose of helping people and businesses prosper, especially in difficult times. As a new normal brings new challenges and new opportunities, we need to be there helping our customers to navigate them.
Arshad will join Helen Edwards and marketing and insight bosses from Reckitt and Pinterest on Wednesday 9 June to debate whether innovation always has to meet known customer needs.
The Festival of Marketing’s ‘Fast Forward’ event will take place virtually between 7-10 June. Marketing experts and practitioners will offer some much needed perspective on what the future holds, discussing how to future proof brands, how to approach innovation and the skills marketing teams need in order to prosper. Find out more and get your pass here.
