A company will not be successful without paying attention to the voice of customers and their habits, the evolution of the purchase of goods and services and the interaction with companies and brands.
The CMO is a natural fit to help lead the company as a whole toward business changes that reflect changing customer needs.
This close relationship between marketing and critical business changes extends to emerging markets.
Its growing importance will place stringent demands on the entire organization to develop, produce and deliver lower-cost goods and services.
Since engineers and store design teams in developed markets will likely not have the necessary information, CMOs will need to develop partners and capabilities to access high-quality local sources of customer information, i.e. databases.
Shaping the company's public profile
The growing importance of third parties will force companies to increase their awareness of blogs, chat rooms and other social media outlets .
They will also need to develop new strategies to capitalize on marketing opportunities revealed by consumers.
Many companies will find that their initial efforts will be defensive and involve changes to the proven approach to managing their public profile.
Traditionally, companies have tended to separate marketing (focusing on customers) from corporate affairs (targeting government officials).
Other elements that are often separated are investor relations (focus on financial analysts) and public relations (directed at the press).
Often, these groups report to different executives: Marketing to the CMO, investor relations to the CFO, and corporate affairs (and perhaps also public relations) to a corporate secretary.
Most corporate affairs executives do not have the background to lead these italy business mailing list types of efforts. This means they are therefore increasingly turning to their marketing counterparts for assistance.
CMOs are the natural coordinators of an integrated effort because they understand customers and sophisticated marketing techniques.
With more countries, more customer segments, more media and more distribution channels, companies and their CMOs are fighting a battle against complexity .
Consider pricing: To set prices effectively, consumer companies operating across multiple channels and geographies must serve the needs of dozens of segments and make fast, analytically informed decisions on up to 20 million individual prices per year.
Many companies are developing new approaches to manage this complexity.
Most choose to give final pricing authority to managers responsible for a brand's performance and support them with centrally established processes and policies to ensure consistency across segments and locations.
Small analytical groups are often crucial to ensuring the collection and analysis of pricing data needed to make good decisions .
A key challenge is reconciling local entrepreneurship with global and cross-segment brand consistency.