Marketing’s Golden Moment in 2021: Clear’s Latest Report Reveals the Way Forward

Clear’s recent report “From Chaos to Clarity” suggests CMO’s role has never been more relevant.

A new report by Clear M&C Saatchi outlines the strategy that brands must embrace to move from chaos to clarity. Clear interviewed over 700 senior executives, including CMOs and CEOs across the U.S.A, U.K, Germany, Singapore, and China, to understand how organizations can thrive amidst uncertainty and unpredictability.

Marketing’s Moment Is Here: What Should You Do?

The report suggests that marketing has never been more influential in business. 51% of the senior executives (and 59% of CEOs) said that marketing’s influence is increasing inside their organization. Only 5% of respondents claimed it is decreasing. Talking about the internal perceptions about marketing, CEOs believe marketing is seen as a “strategic growth driver” and “owners of the data.” So much for the death of the CMO.

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Similarly, CMOs personally feel their influence is growing and that they are directly involved in shaping the organization’s overall vision. Marketing narrowly trails finance as the most influential function, with 89% of CMOs reporting to have at least “a lot of control and input” in shaping business objectives. Overall, the data reveals a significant role and opportunity for senior marketers to drive overall business strategy.

The report also reveals a sense of confidence within marketing departments. There is overall alignment between marketing and business strategy. 72% of respondents and 83% of CMOs reported that their business objectives were translated into clear objectives for marketing. CMOs reported that they and their teams had the right capabilities to deliver against their KPIs. In fact, 95% of CMOs were personally confident in their ability to deliver, and a whopping 99% were confident in their team’s ability to do the same. Based on this data alone, you would think that organizations and their marketing departments are well set up to navigate and harness change.

So, what could possibly go wrong? A deeper dive into what is really going on within these organizations revealed that all is not as well as it initially seems. While “growth through accessing new customers” is the most significant marketing priority cited by both CEOs and senior marketers, it is simultaneously the place where they have failed the most. Clearly, something is not working.

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Clear found that the most fundamental driver of chaos was strategy getting stuck in the boardroom. Worryingly, the data shows that while leadership believes they have a clear strategy for growth, that clarity erodes as you move further from the core of the C-Suite.

Organizations where the role of the CMO had been disaggregated — with the proliferation of chief customer officers (CCO), chief experience officers (CXO), and the like — suffered from this lack of clarity even more. Only 53% of non-CMO, C-Suite marketers believe the strategy is well defined. Rather than creating greater focus and efficiency, this disaggregation of the CMO role seems to be leading to greater confusion.

The easiest way to accommodate conflicting demands is to align on goals without aligning on means or, ultimately, “mistaking goals for strategy.” The study shows that not enough senior leaders understand this point. The differing priorities of CEOs vs. CMOs show something has gone awry in aligning on where to focus.

When asked about what is giving them sleepless nights, CEOs cite “creating a valuable data infrastructure,” “understanding where to invest across a complex media landscape”, and “building a marketing team with the right skill set” as the three biggest issues. By contrast, CMOs agree the media landscape is a concern. But their other biggest worries are “proving ROI on marketing spend” and “leveraging new technologies like AI and voice to commercial advantage.” CEOs expect their CMOs to be strategic, long-term thinkers but demand they deliver results in the here and now.

CEOs have a clear perspective on where the major skills gap is in marketing — data. 60% of them cite ‘Data management’ as the most prominent skill gap, followed by creativity (54%) and digital advertising (46%).

Senior marketers are less clear on where the skills gaps might be, with seven skills areas clustering near the top. Marketers are not as focused on data — either infrastructure or management/analytics — as their CEOs would expect.

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This disconnect extends even further into when marketing should be partnering with agencies or consultancies. Here, CEOs (60%) say marketing should work with third parties to help with ‘experience design’, behind only ‘consumer research’ and ‘advertising’ among 19 capabilities tested. Only 38% of senior marketers agree. Their priority for outsourcing capabilities was instead focused on marketing/consumer research and communications support.

Conclusion

The world around us has never stopped and will never stop changing. So long as change is occurring, there will be a critical role for marketers to play in shaping, refining, and enabling the organization to realize its ambition.

Now is the time to meet these new mandates and drive real change. But this will require moving beyond business as usual, moving beyond comfort zones, and embracing the chaos of modern business.

Clear’s report revealed the fundamental drivers of chaos and identified strategies and frameworks to help bring clarity around where to focus and how to unlock opportunity.

But, most valuably, Clear suggests that marketing is a critical and central part of the solution. In many ways, this could just be the moment for marketing to step up and lead the organization from chaos to clarity.