REQUIRED READING POST

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 requires brand innovation when it comes to supply chain. CMO Council’s dedicated supply chain knowledge center offers a wealth of best practice development.

The Marketing Supply Chain Institute is a dedicated knowledge center focused on benchmark studies, cost audits and competency assessments, content aggregation, report publication and syndication, peer-to-peer interactions, best practice development, vertical industry analytics, and global models and frameworks for strategic sourcing and supplier management.

Go-to-market is a business critical, highly complex, and carefully sequenced process today. However, there can be multiple points of disruption, distress and deficiency in this ecosystem, which is essential to value creation and competitive advantage for any consumer or business marketer. This program combines a series of best practice interviews with a comprehensive demand chain performance audit to address how well marketing content and consumables are delivered to the front line, as well as how this impacts sales effectiveness, revenue generation and customer retention.

In our exclusive CMO Council report, ‘Understanding the Critical Factors to Achieving Marketing Supply Chain Operational Effectiveness and Optimization’, the focus is on optimized marketing supply chain dynamics.

As Marketers seek to provide the most timely, fresh and of-the-moment content to customers and channel alike, old, over-ordered or unutilized materials tend to be stored, destroyed or ignored, left to sit an occupy costly space in offices to warehouses. High levels of waste can generally be attributed to limited access to material utilization, a lack of visibility into the operational process, and a general lack of forecasting and operational rigor. All of these factors combine to create an epidemic of waste that can be summed up most accurately as ‘obsolescence’. DOWNLOAD the report

Marketers must begin to look at these individual symptoms of inefficiency with the Marketing Supply Chain in order to optimize budget allocation, operational management and even the delivery of customer experience. Obsolescence is one of the most serious challenges to Marketing Operations as it looks to undermine budget and operations.

The good news is that a streamlined Marketing Supply Chain is possible. The challenge is that in these critical times where customer engagement is top of mind and budgets are restricting how far and wide programs can potentially reach, waste and unchecked obsolescence are no longer issues left to other departments or hidden in a marketing closet.

In an on-demand CMO Council webinar, the customer journey is the supply chain focus, in ‘The Real Customer Journey: Mapping the Total Customer Experience From Engagement to Fulfillment’. Today’s customer journey does not start and stop at the known touch points of marketing engagement. From word of mouth on social media to the actual last-mile delivery of the product, customers expect that the brands they trust and invest in will be there every step of the way.

In this evergreen content, the Webinar explores how industry leaders are taking a broad view of the customer experience and journey, as well as how this view and process have impacted the bottom line. How are campaigns managed differently when insights into supply chain are available? Who are the key stakeholders, and how are they aligned to ensure the customer experience is managed from the first conversation through to re-order and advocacy? How are marketing leaders orchestrating this view of the customer journey, and how is that strategy embraced cross-functionally and supported technologically? Watch On-Demand