Three-quarters (74%) of senior marketing executives in Europe describe their organization’s digital marketing capability as being in its developmental stages: 43% say their system has potential and is starting to yield results, while 31% are still acquiring the necessary skills. Only 15% report having a digital marketing framework that is highly sophisticated and continually evolving, according to a study by Spencer Stuart.
Most (61%) of these top execs believe that their team’s strengths lie in its vision, creativity, intuition and relationship-building aptitudes, while the remaining 39% instead identify their data gathering, analytics, logic and rational world view as being their main competencies.
It appears that the aim is to seek a more well-rounded balance of the two relatively disparate skill sets, with a slight bias toward data and science, a belief echoed in findings from a separate study revealing how marketers (to be fair, technologically-competent marketers) consider the field to be more science than art. Three-quarters of senior level officers felt that their marketing team could benefit from stronger digital and analytics capabilities, while only a quarter thought that their team could use a boost in creative skills.
Even though CMOs agree that digital marketing and data analytics are critical to a marketing team’s success, they also feel that expertise in those areas are the most difficult to find, according to a different report by Spencer Stuart released last year.
However, marketing leaders think it’s worth the investment of building a powerful data-driven marketing culture in order to gain better customer insight, allocate marketing resources more wisely, and be able to justify further marketing investments. Furthermore, they believe that a strong marketing culture creates stronger cooperation between other departments and increases credibility for the marketing role within the organization.
About the Data: The report is based on in-depth interviews with 10 chief marketing officers and one chief commercial officer, as well as an online survey of 199 senior marketing executives in Europe. Some 64% of respondents report to the CEO and 52% were chief marketing officers with global responsibility. More than half (52%) of the respondents worked for companies with revenues over €5 billion.
