Would you buy from you? Knowing what you know about your product/service and the team behind it, would you invest your hard earned capital in your company? Hopefully, the answer is yes, and it’s just as important that your response is based on real-world experience and not some vision you conjured up of your business as seen through a Vaseline-coated lens.
I raise this today because I read the chart you can see over there which summarizes the results of a study as reported by Marketing Charts. 200 Chief Marketing Officers were asked, by the CMO Council and Deloitte, how they prefer to spend their time:
When respondents were asked where they would prefer to spend their time as marketing leaders, a leading two-thirds said they’d rather team with leadership on global business strategy (66%), while a majority would also want to innovate and implement new approaches, products, and strategies (58%). Just 1 in 6 would prefer to spend their time in meetings and only 1 in 10 would want to review budgets and campaigns.
How this relates to the question I asked initially is simple. My questions put you in the position of the consumer. They imply that you’ve actually used your product or service and have done so as a consumer would (sort of like a secret shopper). The survey responses feel to me as if the CMO’s would prefer to live in a bubble, dreaming up new strategies and products while not particularly wanting to get their hands dirty in the real world activity of listening to customers.
You might wonder how any CMO can strategize without keeping the customer front and center. What’s interesting is that only 6% report that they are tasked with driving routes to revenue across all facets of the business globally. That reads like life in a bubble to me.
Each of us needs to burst whatever bubbles keep us away from our markets and our customers. Planning new products is fine but they can’t be solutions to problems that don’t exist or for which there won’t be demand once consumers realize they have a need (and hopefully they already do). You with me?
Consult Keith 