CMOs and managing directors representing several brands, organisations, and global platforms across the UAE sounded a clarion call to get back to the fundamentals and to take a full-360-degree approach to marketing during a closed-door roundtable discussion held at the Dubai Media City headquarters.
The two-hour roundtable discussion touched upon creating value, customer experience, personalisation, the role of CMOs on the Executive Committee (ExCo), differentiating value from the data and tools that drive it, the need for patience and a long-term approach to building a brand, and much more.
Speaking on-the-record to Campaign Middle East, Majed Al Suwaidi, Senior Vice President of Dubai Media City, Dubai Studio City, and Dubai Production City at TECOM Group, said, “Effective marketing is the lynchpin of sustainable business growth as consumers gravitate towards brands committed to authentic storytelling and building genuine connections. These stories are best told by diverse and multicultural voices that make up Dubai’s immense pool of talent, which has transformed the city into a dynamic hub where innovative narratives are conceived and brought to life.”
Organised by The Marketing Society, Dubai Lynx, and Campaign Middle East, the roundtable discussions were held under the Chatham House Rules, leading to open and honest conversations on what’s keeping CMOs up at night, the current business challenges as a CMO, and the growth opportunities that CMOs foresee in the months ahead.
Marketers need to focus more on brand – one of the most powerful way of creating value.
CMOs need to create value – for customers, brand and the business
The overarching consensus from the conversations was a reminder that the prime objective of CMOs, and the brands they represent, is to create value – that’ s why the role exists. The role of a CMO or a Head of Marketing is to drive long-term, sustainable growth.
CMOs either ought to create value for the brand, for customers and communities, or for the business – or ideally, all of above. They need to find ways and means to build a brand that creates long-term value, offers value to customers, and generates through conversion, sales, and increased revenues.
One of the leaders at the discussion said, “Marketers need to focus more on brand – which is very different and should not be tethered to a ‘branding exercise’. This is one of the most powerful way of creating value. Within this objective, the number one challenge remains understanding the consumer, improving customer experience, and understanding the value that CMOs bring to them.”
Focus on customer experience and personalisation
In a world often filled with bad news, and stark reminders of the difficulties of life, the question that CMOs need to answer are: how are they being a ray of light, sparking positive emotions through positive experiences, solving real problems, and making the lives of consumers easier?
If marketers forget the ultimate customer experience, then they have failed, because that is what builds a brand; that is what creates recommendation; that is what delivers the momentum for a business to succeed in the long-term.
Customer-focused marketing needs to seep into not only the tactics implemented as marketers, but also into the actual outcomes.
“When marketers create a level of customer experience that it seeps into the very culture of an organisation and becomes almost invisible – where serving the customers’ every need becomes so natural – then, it opens up a massive opportunity to collect data from customers in a way that services can be further customised and personalised to meet their rising expectations and specifications,” a CMO said at the roundtable.
The aim is to develop a level of customer experience that actually drives brand loyalty and creates a level of stickiness that brands and marketers yearn for.
Role of the CMOs on the ExCo
The discussions also focused on the importance of collaboration and knowledge-sharing by getting the CMOs a seat on the Executive Committee (ExCo) and then making the most of that opportunity.
Unfortunately, the truth of the industry – as it currently stands – is that marketers still need to jump through many hoops to get invited to the ExCo, and to get invited to the Board as a CMO.
A recent McKinsey report highlighted that 40 per cent of Fortune 500 companies don’t have a single CMO, growth-related or customer-related role in their ExCos.
“The bitter pill that many marketers need to swallow is that most C-suite executives and board members don’t often understand the impact and value of brand and marketing because they see it as a cost centre,” a CMO at the roundtable said.
In fact, 45 per cent of CFOs surveyed by McKinsey stated openly that the reason they declined marketing proposals or failed to fully fund the proposals in the past is because they didn’t demonstrate a clear line to value.
As one of the leaders added, “CMOs are not invited to that table because very often we don’t understand the metrics of the business, or we don’t use the same metrics of success. I’ve seen good relationship with CFOs when they understand the marketing metrics, and we understand the financial metrics.”
Common questions raised by CEOs, CFOs, CTOs and CIOs in a day and age where success often boils down to the bottom line are: Why are you spending that much? What is the commercial value?
The onus to answer this question and demonstrate value, therefore, falls back on the CMO or the heads/directors of marketing.
It is up to the CMOs to develop not only a good relationship with the CEOs, CFOs, CTOs and CIOs, but also to understand what each of those roles entail, and find a way to demonstrate the value of brand and marketing to each of them.
“This means that the CMO has to be the jack-of-all-trades: must understand technology and be able to go toe-to-toe with the CTO; must be able to read the P&L and explain the value derived for the brand from the budgets pitched; must be able to explain the long-term sustainable benefits of building a brand that go beyond the advanced analytics, predictive insights, and the short-term financial value tied to performance marketing,” a CMO explained.
While part of a CMOs role is to learn the different ‘approaches’ they have to take while conversing with different C-suite executives, another part of the role involves being a knowledgeable ambassador for brand and marketing and ‘educating’ other C-suite executives about the long-term impact of doing it right.
The truth is that marketers do not solve customers’ problems in perfect ways yet. However, marketers can move the needle in a positive direction if the ‘Four Musketeers’ at the C-suite work together.
As one of the leaders at the roundtable explained, “Value can be attained when the Four Musketeers are tied at the hip in any organisation. Those four musketeers are sales, marketing, product and finance.”
The conclusion was straightforward: CMOs need to invest the right amount of time with their ExCo members, identify the value that each of them bring to the table, and explain the value that they can add.
CMOs getting stuck in the numbers labyrinth
Another big challenge raised within this discussion was procurement: CMOs and marketers often have to put up with new agencies every one or two years – sometimes even for shorter periods of time – because procurement is always looking for ways to cut costs amid shrinking budgets and deliver ‘value’ for the least amount of capital spent.
There is a constant pressure on CMOs to try ‘doing more with less’ when it takes agencies almost six months to a year to truly understand a brand, it’s vision, and the path to attain that vision.
“As a result, CMOs have pivoted to tactics that have a proven impact. There’s a growing focus on data-driven decisions, drawing the right insights from existing first-party data, bottom-of-funnel marketing impact, intent data, conversion rate optimisation (CRO), customer retention strategies, and personalisation,” a CMO at the roundtable said.
Yet, amid this push toward better data-driven strategies and insights, there’s a need to ensure that data, artificial intelligence, data analytics don’t distract from the core focus on the true value of brand and marketing: customers and loyal communities.
And if they do distract, the CMOs need to put their hands up and take the blame.
As one of the leading marketers said, “It’s our fault because we’re not having the right conversations. We all got siloed. We allowed ourselves to get silent. It’s our fault because we’re getting distracted by the bling of AI right?”
“What should a marketer actually do? Marketers should help connect the dots. We are are a voice for the external world. We need to translate their demands and expectations to the ExCo. We need to come back from the outside world and help our internal audience understand what needs to get done.”
Differentiating value from the data and tools that drive it
CMOs at the roundtable also discussed how performance marketing ought to be differentiated from brand.
They raised some interesting questions:
- How many companies actually have performance marketers, but don’t enjoy customer success because they don’t have anyone managing their overall relationship with the customer?
- How many companies have jumped into AI and automated customer support without a care for whether it’s actually creating value, solving a customer’s core problem, or having a detrimental affect on customer experience?
Rather than getting distracted by performance marketing, data, and AI tools, organisations should be holistically look at how they can benefit from delivering value to the customer, and building better customer experiences.
CMOs need to ask the real questions: does AI really add value? If it does, in what ways and are we using it in those specific ways?
At the end of the day, the core objective is not to “implement AI in any way possible across all departments. It’s not about jumping onto the latest tool or trend. At the end of the day, AI, targeting, performance measurement, and data-driven insights are merely tools that support the marketing pillars of personalisation and customer experience, each of which need to be used in context to truly derive value for the brand,” a CMO said.
Else, marketers run the risk of shifting their focus away from customers who are already saying that something isn’t working right – except instead of solving for that problem, they just have plenty of data to prove that the problem exists.
“Within marketing, we’re always stuck between the hype cycle and the daily complexities that we need to manage. Sure, GenAI helps to do something with the data we have, actually extract a level of insight, plan initiatives and campaigns, and optimise it in real-time. But finding the balance and reminding ourselves that we’re doing all of this for the customer – to drive relevance and solve a problem – rather than merely to run a campaign that performs well, that’s super hard,” a leader at the roundtable said.
“Sure, we can use GenAI to create campaigns in seconds rather than weeks, we can actually get a better picture of a persona in the target audience, know why and how that the person will transact. But how are we using that information to make the lives of our consumers easier? That’s the real question,” they added.
The panel concluded with a consensus, “Everything you do is for the customer. Do right by them. The money will come. We often focus on key performance indicators, but these are lagging indicators. If you truly listen to your customers, they have plenty to tell you right off the bat. Marketers need to learn commerciality, stay curious, and ensure that creativity goes beyond their campaigns and becomes a mindset – because that’s how CMOs can truly solve the customers’ problems and generate value in unique ways.”
