The Outlook for Marketing:
Challenge and Opportunity

Today’s marketing leaders face new challenges and opportunities: globalization, hyper-competition, digital marketing, analytics, and non-stop demands for accountability.  Many are looking for help with pressing needs including optimizing their marketing spend, and with longer-term solutions to maximize their marketing capabilities and impact.

Today's marketing challenges run the gamut and include:
  • Reductions in marketing budgets or staffing, combined with growing demands for accountability
  • Ineffective collaboration between marketing and sales or between corporate marketing and regions 
  • Pressures for marketing modernization and automation solutions
  • Market, segment, and category fragmentation 
  • Commoditization of products and services
  • New communication and media
  • Company mergers and acquisitions.
While there are many challenges, opportunities for Marketing are many as well.  They include:
  • Reallocating portions of marketing spend to higher ROI activity
  • Adoption and impact of new digital marketing tools and techniques
  • Better alignment and integration with sales, channels, and agencies
  • Optimizing marketing processes to improve and align decision making
  • Clear metrics to track and drive marketing performance 
  • Compelling business plans that drive targeted innovation
  • More effective commercialization of new technologies or services.