A new study# by The Economist Business Intelligence Unit found that corporate marketing departments are increasingly more proactive in making product design and delivery decisions.
Among the key conclusions:
- Marketing departments are increasingly shifting their focus from attracting new customers to linking customer feedback and data more closely into their companies’ strategic decisions -- this enables organizations to operate under shorter in market testing time frames and to iterate quickly based upon product acceptance.
- Defining customer segments more accurately and tailoring product and service/support appropriately is helping increase customer satisfaction and retention.
Diane Adams, CMO of Pennsylvania-based FXI said: “The closer we are to our customers, the better we understand what their needs are, the better forecasting we have, the better our time to delivery, and ultimately the better our return on investment.”
- Personalized product and service offerings and news ways to engage customers through multiple channels, which have been the domain of consumer-facing businesses, are becoming more prevalent in B2B companies -- video content distribution has been particularly popular.
Companies are now tracking actions more fluidly across channels along the customer lifecycle. For this reason, marketers are increasingly expanding their purview beyond traditional competences into analytics -- a trend I discussed five years ago -- as well as an understanding of budgets and forecasting -- which in many organizations have been the responsibility of product and sales groups.
As well, changing business models are forcing marketers to expand their knowledge of not only their own business environments, but of those of their clients and supply chains.
We're seeing this happen particularly in the retail space, where marketers are finding new ways to adapt to the new reality of people buying more online.
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Valeria is an experienced listener. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. To book her for a speaking engagement click here.