CEOs believe marketers lack business credibility and fail to focus on effectiveness – report
CEOs believe marketers lack business credibility and fail to focus on effectiveness – report
The vast majority of CEOs believe that marketers lack business credibility, are not the business growth generators they should be and are not focused enough on effectiveness, according to a report from Fournaise Marketing Group.
In compiling its report, the company interviewed more than 600 large corporation and SMB CEOs and decision makers in Europe, the US, Asia and Australia.
Some 73pc of the CEOs believe marketers lack business credibility and are unable to demonstrate how their cross-channel marketing strategies and campaigns help to increase their organisations’ top line in terms of more customer demand, sales, prospects, conversions and market share.
Seventy-seven percent of respondents said marketers talk about brand values, brand equity and similar parameters that top management has difficulties in linking back to revenue sales, EBIT and market valuation.
Seventy-four percent of CEOs said they focus too much on the latest marketing trends like social media, but can rarely demonstrate how these can help generate more business for the company.
Seventy-three percent said that when marketers are asked to increase their marketing ROI, they tend to understand it as cost cutting through better economies of scale or negotiations with third party partners and agencies, instead of top-line growth generation.
Sixty-seven percent complained that, unlike CFOs and sales forces, marketers don’t think enough like businesspeople, and focus instead on the creative, ‘arty’ and ‘fluffy’ side of marketing and rely too much on their ad agencies to come up with the next big idea.
Seventy-two percent said that marketers are always asking for more money, but can rarely explain how much incremental business this money will generate.
Seventy percent of CEOs said marketers bombard their stakeholders with marketing data that hardly relate to or mean anything for their company’s P&L.
Interestingly, 69pc of marketers interviewed said they believe their strategies and campaigns to make an impact on their company’s business, even though they can’t precisely quantify it.
“Until marketers start speaking the P&L language of their CEOs and stakeholders, and until they start tracking the business effectiveness of their strategies and campaigns to prove they generate incremental customer demand, they will continue to lack credibility in the eyes of their CEOs and will continue to be seen more as a cost centre than as an asset,” said Jerome Fontaine, CEO and chief tracker of Fournaise.
Pictured: Jerome Fontaine