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Scaffolding Strategy in Uncertain Times

July 11, 2025 By Louise Burgers

This decade so far has undoubtedly been one of the most challenging for global marketers in recent times. From the pandemic to wars, tariff uncertainty and a volatile political environment in many regions, as well as the relentless impact of AI, marketers need to be futurists to survive. We know how at the start of this decade, in 2020, global economies were devastated by shutdown’s due to the Covid-19 Pandemic, with restrictions lasting up
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The Fusion of AI and Marketing

June 09, 2025 By Louise Burgers

The fusion of artificial intelligence and marketing technology has reshaped how businesses connect with their audiences. This timeline demands a strategic approach. To stay competitive and drive growth, marketers need to use insights from data analysis, AI tools, as well as creativity and innovation.   Is Your Data Prepared to Unlock GenAI's Business Value? After a year of delivering mostly marginal efficiency gains, GenAI is on the verge
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Marketing’s Key Challenges in 2025

March 28, 2025 By Louise Burgers

MarTech is a key indicator of where marketers should be focusing this year, in the CMO Council’s new report, The Marketing Vitality Index. With the CMO Council’s annual assessment of leading Marketing Performance Indicators (MPIs), there is evidence that 2025 is a defining, milestone year ahead. Most notably: It is time for marketing to move from its perception as a cost center to that of a command center powered by business-centric,
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How Marketers Can Build Resilient Brands

January 17, 2025 By Louise Burgers

Tap into the wisdom of marketing thought leaders to find out how to invest in resilient brands and meet market challenges head on. Successful marketers constantly reposition brands for long-term, accelerated growth, finding new spaces outside their category boundaries and seeking breakthrough innovations. In fact, the most valuable brands in the world create shareholder value faster, resist market downturns and, also manage to weather recessions
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Marketing Role Includes Business Growth

December 06, 2024 By Louise Burgers

Marketing is evolving at a rapid rate and the role of the Chief Marketing Officer is transforming, shifting to include driving growth strategy. Chief Marketing Officers now have an opportunity to drive growth within the C-suite and reinvent their company purpose and marketing position. As PwC said in their 2025 predictions for CMOs, “there’s an opportunity for CMOs to carve out a role as innovator, strategist and growth-driver. From working
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Collaboration is Key to Solving Data Security Issues

November 04, 2024 By Louise Burgers

The top three marketing initiatives posing the greatest security risks to business are AI and machine learning, customer behavior data, and the Internet of Things. So, how should marketing and security collaborate to safeguard brand trust?   Safeguarding Brand Trust Amid the Data Storm Much rides on marketing’s relationship with information security to acquire, maintain and secure customer data for competitive advantage. Together, marketing
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How Marketers Amplify AI

September 27, 2024 By Louise Burgers

Matching marketing and Artificial Intelligence is initiating marketing-in-the-moment with data-driven AI marketing. It saves time, leads to operational efficiencies, creates quality customer interactions, and enhances customer engagement. Although Artificial Intelligence is revolutionizing industries worldwide, many businesses—both large and small—are still not fully tapping into its transformative potential... or testing it at all with
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Marketing’s Strategic Interest

April 04, 2024 By Louise Burgers

CMO Council’s Strategic Interest Groups showcase thought leadership programs with dedicated online knowledge and resource centers exploring the forces and factors that accelerate, inhibit, disrupt, diversify and sustain brand growth. Subject matter experts and marketing leaders contribute insights, content, opinions, case studies and best practices across the various categories relevant to CMOs, providing tools and resources to help enhance
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The Creator Economy is Changing

March 07, 2024 By Louise Burgers

The future of the Creator Economy allows brands to concentrate on community building, niche nano-markets and cultivate better relationships with content creators influencing consumers. “The creator economy refers to the economic system that has emerged with the rise of digital platforms and technology, enabling individuals to create and distribute their own content, products, or services directly to an audience. In this model, individuals,
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Growth Mindset Matters in Marketing

February 23, 2024 By Louise Burgers

With the rapid introduction of industry-impact technologies such as Generative AI, the modern marketing leader can calibrate company strategy to innovate across the organization, ensuring CMOs are recognized as a catalyst to growth. PWC has firmly put the CMO at the center of the organization, labelling them as “growth catalysts”: “Now, more than ever, lines are being blurred across the C-suite, and CMOs can carve out a role
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Benchmark Branding Best Practice

February 09, 2024 By Louise Burgers

Creative and effective ads generate more than four times as much profit, meaning that brands should bolster creative branding strategy to drive growth. CMO Council’s Brand Inspiration Center is a hub for innovation without limitation in today’s complex marketing world, where brand managers are being challenged to make smarter, more informed decisions. Brand Inspiration Center aims to benchmark best practice and provide solutions to global
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Four Focus Areas for CMOs in 2024

January 26, 2024 By Louise Burgers

There is no doubt that this year will be turbulent given local and global events, and the mandate for Chief Marketers to steer business growth garners a superior skills set. CMO Council is tracking top trends to equip CMOs with the insights needed.   The CMO as a Growth Catalyst It is up to the CMO to find “uncommon growth in the storm” assert both PwC and Prophet. “Now, more than ever, lines are being blurred across the C-suite,
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Personalization Powers Brand Growth

January 11, 2024 By Louise Burgers

Brands that get personalization right in customer relationships are rewarded with growth. In fact, almost 80 percent of consumers will make repeat purchases from brands that customize their experience – and refer those companies to friends and family. A McKinsey study found that 78% of consumers are more likely to make repeat purchases from brands that personalize the brand experience; while 80% are more likely to refer their family and
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Contextualizing Customer Engagement

December 15, 2023 By Louise Burgers

Centralizing customer engagement with CMO strategy to create customer-centric company culture is marketing’s mandate to champion customer experience, respond to challenges and the competitive environment, and surface revenue opportunities. In accordance with CMO Council research, we found that CMOs need a complete 360-degree view of the customer to fully understand the path-to-purchase, including a thorough understanding of how well they reach,
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Modern Marketing’s Multichannel Mandate

November 27, 2023 By Louise Burgers

Practitioner-based insights are imperative for marketers to meet current challenges head-on. Through interacting with peers across different industries, marketers gain a different perspective and a real-world understanding of the multichannel mandate for marketing strategy. At a recent series of networking events hosted by CMO Council with HCLSoftware, “Digital Excellence Unleashed”, Chief Marketing Officers in South Africa spoke about
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Small Business Booster Strategies

November 17, 2023 By Louise Burgers

The start-up market is growing annually, with 33.2 million small businesses in existence across the U.S. But 20% of all new businesses close within the first year and only 34.6% make it past 10 years. What strategies should entrepreneurs execute to ensure they survive and thrive? Entrepreneurship is alive and kicking, with two in five Americans planning to start a business this year, ensuring the startup market expands. Seventy-four percent of businesses plan
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Securing Sales Conversion with Confidence

November 03, 2023 By Louise Burgers

The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council’s program to boost B2B sales to augment account marketing yield through a new certified Lead Evaluation and Assurance Process (LEAP), will create a best practice marketing model, and activate AI action aimed at improving the predictability, integrity and performance of content-driven demand-generation campaigns.  CMO Council seeks input from leading B2B account-based marketers for LEAP, which will
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The Market in Performance Marketing

October 20, 2023 By Louise Burgers

There has been a shift for some time away from pure promotions to performance marketing, as marketers are expected to deliver on valuable lead generation and measurable return on investment (ROI). As this On-Demand Webinar, Building a High-Performance Marketing Engine: Boosting the Operational Efficiencies and Effectiveness of the Modern Marketing Organization, outlined, this has been a core responsibility for marketers over the past decade. It is
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Making Sense of Sales

October 04, 2023 By Louise Burgers

Through in-depth research, reports and on demand webinars, CMO Council moves the marketer’s understanding to overcome any chasm between marketing and sales to better business growth opportunities. From exclusive research reports to on-demand webinars, we bring you an understanding of the immense challenges faced by CMOs and how to manage increased budgetary pressures; eliminate media waste; gain the most from media investments; rejuvenate current
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How Social Media Strategy Evolved

September 18, 2023 By Louise Burgers

Currently, social commerce, or social shopping, is steering social media evolution and brand community development. However, the growth of social media marketing has amplified marketer's efforts, particularly post-pandemic. With the advent of social media marketing, we entered a new era of ‘fast advertising’ where consumers could immediately interact with your brand in real time. One thing is clear: the ability to access real-time actionable
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Brand Benefit In Building Communities

September 01, 2023 By Louise Burgers

Creating communities of consumers around your brand and a community-first culture in your company, will transform loyalty programs into authentic relationships with your customers. And changing consumer needs will force brands to adapt as power dynamics evolve. Accenture Song research showed that in an unstable world, core consumer buying habits are affected by constant catastrophic crises. One result is the ‘Great Cancellation’ as consumers
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AI Amplifies Customer Connection

August 18, 2023 By Louise Burgers

For more than two decades, marketers have embraced new digital tools to enable them to better understand all the data generated by customer behavior evolving online as ecommerce grew, through the impact of social media with its new data sets, and now the defining innovation of this decade: Artificial Intelligence. AI is amplifying marketers' understanding of the customer even more, through the use of new AI programs to analyze unstructured customer
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Sustainable Supply Chain Innovation

August 04, 2023 By Louise Burgers

Innovation is the key to a sustainable supply chain which reduces environmental impact. This was a key headline at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. What emerged is that marketers need to prioritize action and work closer with the sustainability function, especially within supply chains. In the Cannes Lions 2023 retrospective, Kantar says businesses need to do more to make a meaningful impact, putting sustainability first, which
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Create Contagious Content Marketing

July 19, 2023 By Louise Burgers

Content marketing leads marketing’s investment in artificial intelligence tools. But despite the new shiny advantages of AI, content marketers must still know how to create contagious content marketing; measure core content marketing ROI; how to convert content to customer leads; cost-effective ways to create future content, and more. RELATED: Can CMOs Capitalize on ChatGPT? Digital content is the key to engagement in today's connected marketplace.
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Testing Times Need Talented Marketers

July 06, 2023 By Louise Burgers

We all know these are challenging and uncertain times for marketing leadership around the world, as much of what we thought we knew was disrupted by the pandemic and the acceleration of digital transformation. And who had artificial intelligence on their Bingo card this year, or more importantly, in their marketing strat? Marketing leadership need all the tactics in their toolbox to tackle the curveballs coming at them over the past couple of years.
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Personalization Pay-off Powered by AI

June 09, 2023 By Louise Burgers

Artificial intelligence tools will make a profound impression on personalization, moving marketers ever closer to their customers. For over a decade, CMO Council has been probing personalization. The impact plus influence of individualized content delivery is what personalized marketing is all about. While AI is going mainstream and everything AI is suddenly all anyone is talking about, it is important to not lose sight of the marketing values that
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CX Embedded in Marketing DNA

June 01, 2023 By Louise Burgers

It’s no secret that the last few years have upended the way customers want to interact with companies. Digital engagement has led to higher customer expectations, bigger demands and about a million more choices if one brand doesn’t deliver. Privacy laws and changes by tech companies have marketers scrambling to get the data they need to meet customer expectations. The rise of the data-driven marketer has propelled the marketing function
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Metrics For Marketing Leadership

May 18, 2023 By Louise Burgers

Disruptive times call for confidence in marketing strategy – but how do marketers achieve this? CMO Council has been benchmarking marketing performance metrics for two decades in our research and reports, which provide marketing leadership with a first-rate framework of measurement and metrics. A recent CMO Council research survey showed that 2 in 3 marketing leaders lacked confidence in their ability to achieve goals in the face of economic
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Marketing With Proven Purpose

May 04, 2023 By Louise Burgers

Latest CMO Council research shows that in order for brands to connect with their customers, they need to prioritise purpose and become conscious corporate socially responsible brands. The marketer’s journey towards growing authentic brands which are also responsible corporate citizens trusted by consumers, continues to evolve. When alerting Chief Marketers as to the disruptive market conditions they will face in 2023, CMO Council Founder and
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Content Marketing’s New Hyper-Relevance

April 17, 2023 By Louise Burgers

Artificial intelligence is disrupting the marketplace and Content Marketing is being amplified by AI as the new intelligent chat tools make an immediate impact across the marketing function. The keywords are localization and personalization, and the conversations we are currently tracking centre around content marketing and localized marketing being the core beneficiaries of marketing attention around OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other tools being developed. Content
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Ascendant Adaptive Marketing Strategy

March 31, 2023 By Louise Burgers

Agile adaptive marketing strategy is on the ascendant in many categories as it makes sense of the chaos in current markets, allowing marketers to delve deeper into data that disrupts sectors. Classical or traditional marketing strategy takes market predicatibiity into account – including customer behavior. However, the uncertainty of the past few years has meant more unknowns for marketers and radically changed consumer behavior, leading to
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Marketing’s MarTech Migration to Maximize Growth

March 10, 2023 By Louise Burgers

From AI-driven conversational chatbots to the multidimensional metaverse, MarTech has dominated the marketing sphere for the past decade and is still leading current marketing strategy, given the massive focus on the personalisation of AI tools to come. Having the right MarTech stack in place ensures marketers can keep right on track with data collection and analysis, campaign measurement, customer communication, and so on. and prepare for the next
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Signposts To Charting The New Customer Journey

February 17, 2023 By Louise Burgers

Consistent changes to customer communication with the rise of AI chatbots and fluctuating power dynamics between brands and consumers is adding new dimensions to the customer experience. From sophisticated tools for audience engagement to lead conversion and fulfilling customer expectations, marketers must keep the pedal to the metal to drive profitable business growth. The focus for this year is very much on perfecting the omnichannel customer experience,
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Chatter Around Chat Intelligence And Customer Personalization

February 02, 2023 By Louise Burgers

The year has been dominated by technology news around the artificial intelligence model Chat GPT launched by a AI research lab, Open AI. While the innovative AI is being tested and evaluated by many sectors, marketers have been embedding AI tech in CX systems to bolster customer experience in MarTech innovation for some years now. Data analytics and AI are critical to creating richer CX. But marketing executives also know that however AI develops
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Quantifying The Value Of The CMO

January 20, 2023 By Louise Burgers

Current disruptive market conditions worldwide have created a crisis of meaning for chief marketers as they face a myriad of challenges in a vastly transformed landscape post-pandemic. Yet CMOs are still expected to boost the marketing performance of the organizations and brands they represent; tackle organizational challenges; deal with an increasingly complex digital environment; and rapidly add to their own skills set so they remain relevant in
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