“We’re all marketers now”

Marketing leaders from AMEX, Yahoo and Virgin write on future directions in marketing in this McKinsey article; focusing on the shift from marketing as a communications function to becoming the engine room of the company’s customer engagement.  There’s nothing earth shatteringly fresh here, but it is a decent summary of the changing world facing today’s marketers.

Emphasis is placed upon today’s increasingly collaborative buying process, that in turn requires more coordination of the many avenues of connection between consumers and companies.  Some good examples are shared of how companies are approaching the design, build and operation of customer engagement to address this.  Further marketing leaders must make some changes

1. Distribute some activities to areas better placed to manage aspects of customer interaction.
2. Create councils and partnerships with representation from other functions to coordinate and drive collaboration.
3. Elevate consumer insights to a strategic discipline to ensure feedback is captured across touch-points, patterns identified,business inferences drawn & action is decisive.
4. (Become) more data rich and analytically intense. With an exponential increase in data flows,  more collaboration is required to collect and integrate data and greater analytical effort and sophistication to extract insights.