5 Marketing Predictions For Year 2016

We're now in the middle of 2015 and less than 6 months and we'll encounter the beginning of 2016. The very fast and vast changes in today's world suggest that marketing will undergo major changes over the coming years. In this article we're going to discover the main themes for the future in the field of marketing.

In six research surveys done with marketers in companies with revenue over $500M in 2014, a question was asked about their plans for two years from now. The answer is in this article.

Here are five themes for the future which resonated across multiple surveys and form the basis for these predictions. Remember, they are made specifically for large and extra-large companies.

1) Customer experience will be the battleground.

Consumers now enjoy abundant choices and massive transparency thanks to social platforms. This erodes traditional product-based competitive advantages; marketers must look to new tools of differentiation. Most successful companies expect to compete primarily on customer experience in the next two years.

In 2016 customer experience will garner the highest level of marketing investment; it is one of three areas in which CEO's expectations of CMOs will increase the most; and bleeding-edge technologies to improve it will be the top innovation project marketers undertake. Marketers will lead the customer experience cross-functionally across all touch points in the majority of companies by 2016.

2)  How marketers use customer data will determine the level of success.

If you ask progressive companies about their use of data and analytics in marketing; you can easily identify a pattern that is similar between all these high caliber companies. These companies value data more than their less progressive competitors. They spend much more money and time than others acquiring and analyzing data, and they derive more value from it, both directly (by selling it) and indirectly (by distributing it throughout the organization and acting on it).

Managing, collecting and making use of internal and external data was the second highest area of CEO's increased expectations for CMOs. Marketers will analyze data less and synthesize it more, leading to better and more actionable conclusions. Distribution of the data to decentralized groups such as brands or business units will occur to allow for informed decisions about what action to take. One other important point to be taken into consideration; outsourcing the data analysis to top-notch analytics business process outsourcers will be more prevalent.

3)  Digital commerce will be linked with marketing.

Leading and supporting digital commerce was called out as the second highest priority for CMO investment over the next two years, after customer experience, in a recent survey Gartner undertook with The CMO Club. Recent study with several hundred marketers tested this hypothesis "As companies transition from operationally focused e-commerce to customer-centric digital commerce, greater marketing investment is required to create digital offerings and design compelling involvement at all touchpoints in the customer buying journey".

We found that in 25% of organizations, marketing has total responsibility for digital commerce, and in 46% of companies, marketing owns a digital commerce.  Whether you lead or support your company's digital commerce efforts, plan for higher investment and a greater role in crafting compelling commerce experiences for your customers.

4)  Marketing will set the strategy for not just marketing technology, but for all customer-facing technology.

Almost 50% of marketers are now responsible for all of the traditional "4 P's" of marketing – product, price, place and promotion; and for a significant role in strategic planning and major investment decisions that shape company business strategy and results, as well as in digital business transformation. That number has been increasing every year.

No one knows your customers better than your marketing team. Marketing will be intensely involved in all technology that touches the customer as it works on improving the customer experience with customer service, sales and operations. It already sets the strategy and develops the roadmap for marketing technology in over 90% of companies. In a growing number of companies it is moving into different elements of revenue management, including former sales systems. By the end of 2016, customer-facing technology strategy and roadmaps will be led by marketing in at least one quarter of companies.

5)  Marketing innovation will come out of the closet.

For the second year in a row we found that marketers are setting aside more than 9% of their budget for innovation. Leading a culture of change and company-wide innovation was the third highest ranked increased CEO's expectations of CMOs. More marketing executives have innovation in their title.  An increasing number of CMOs manage product development as well as product management. Digital business transformation is causing many industries to shift their business model and offerings to digital vs. physical; putting marketing squarely in the middle of such innovation.

Then there are innovation technologies. Recent research found more than half of marketers have already deployed or are piloting and implementing bleeding edge emerging technologies such as automatic content recognition, artificial intelligence for marketing, and the use of virtual assistants for marketing purposes. If your company seeks competitive differentiation, you won't find it in off-the-shelf technologies – that will get you to competitive parity at best. Over one third of companies currently have an incubation fund to invest in emerging marketing technologies, and we expect that to increase by 2016.

A final word; predictions are always risk because they won't apply to all companies equally.  The ones you read here were put together for large and very large companies.  But I'd rather suggest that you read them and judge for yourself how they might impact your company, and whether you should build them into your planning.