OpenMagazine

In this day and age, marketing has surely become more complex. In addition to technological advances and societal issues such as COVID-19 and the climate crisis, there has been a rise of expectations for marketers and their social performance. Marketing functions are certainly transforming with these combinations of forces requiring marketers to be more agile, accountable and interdependent for their company’s growth. Marketing leaders struggle most with transformation efforts for three reasons. Firstly, they often look at transformation as an exercise or reshaping rather than rethinking how a changing environment can enable new types of value. Secondly, marketers often frame transformation projects from one state to another and this mindset often inhibits synergies between traditional and modern marketing practices. Third, they also often allow modernization to be dispersed across teams without a holistic operational framework. In result, this has made various groups pursuing uncoordinated change initiatives and undermining marketing’s ability to drive growth. 

It is known that due to the pandemic there has been a rise in expectations for marketers’ social performance. Your organization needs a value-based goal for marketing and a strategy to determine the capabilities needed to achieve it whether it’s with new technologies, processes and structures. In the effort to acquire customers, your organization has to create value for them. Moreover, customers need to experience those values; by creating this value to enhance satisfaction across their customer experience this requires focus on improving through constant innovation. For example, some companies are constantly creating new types of experiences such as Shanghai’s KFC stores accepting orders via mobile apps and delivering food to long-distance trans passengers at their stop of choice. 

This value enhances the meaning of a company’s offering and how customers perceive their brand and relationship with it. Companies have increasingly created these values by merging storytelling and public relations to facilitate the design and delivery of messages. There should be a sense of community among users to go beyond a product’s emotional and functional benefit by adopting an environmental or social mission. By creating engagement value it allows marketers to build purpose and optimize connections to strengthen customer relationships. Brands across all sectors have embraced social activism in their own authentic ways. Committing to nurture customer involvement with social efforts would reinforce meaning, relevance and trust that would be difficult to achieve through product-centred efforts alone. 

Marketers could also help increase engagement value by encouraging customers to interact with one another and sharing knowledge. For example brands like Glossier which is a direct-to-consumer-beauty-products brand help facilitate community groups focus on pertinent topics. Moreover, having user groups would help understand customers’ needs better. Glossier is constantly exploring social commerce that involves community members and also uses influencer marketing to sell its product. Furthermore, marketing teams seem to always spot ways to expand their current offerings and guide to development. Today’s technology allows marketers to help companies enter new categories and even other sectors. Your marketing

organization should also prepare to help capture new business models and technologies that spur customer demand. 

Hence why the marketing role’s strength in a company has never been more important, many leaders struggle with independent and specialized teams that engage in expanding activities across an organization. The future of marketing will be enhanced if marketers are clear about their mission and in a position to communicate their values towards their organization. Values created for consumers and internally for themselves should be communicated efficiently as the changes in the marketing industry such as digital platforms, data analytics and consumer expectations is constantly evolving. Here are some of the highlights in creating customer value to attract and retain customers: 

Exchange Value: 

Marketers create this value when they match their offerings to their customer needs. This requires a skill to recognize what customers are looking for and understanding what problem they need to solve. This calls for sharp conversion, personalization and prediction capabilities. 

Experience Value: 

Marketers focus on creating this value to eliminate hassles and enhance satisfaction across customer journeys. This requires value augmentation and offering designs through constant innovation. 

Engagement Value: 

This value enhances the meaning of a company’s offering – how customers perceive the brand and their relationship with it. Companies need to nurture a sense of community among its users and go beyond the traditional functional benefits. By creating this engagement value it requires marketers to build purpose and optimize connections. 

Strategic Value: 

There are often ways that marketing teams spot to expand their current offerings and guide the development of new business methods. They would require the ability to discover growth and build platforms. Teams traditionally focus a large extent on identifying opportunities. However, today’s technology has allowed marketers to help companies enter new sectors, therefore, marketing teams are able to help capture new revenue. 

Operational Value: 

Many leaders struggle with specialized teams as their work can be hard to integrate. Organizations can create an operational value for a company by aligning disparate teams around a shared growth agenda. By creating a marketing approach this increases their speed, agility and collaboration. The aim is to improve talent management and strengthen execution methods.

Knowledge value: 

The marketing function can create knowledge value through the use of new technologies. In this day and age, artificial intelligence-powered data analytics can tease out the causal relationships between marketing investments and business outcomes, thus improving marketing efficiency. 

In conclusion, marketing leaders often struggle to carry out changes in order to advance the marketing’s operating effectiveness. They need to bring clarity to process and guide the design of a marketing organization in this day and age. The work created should be just as important with the new focus to lead the formation of the company.