What 2023 taught us about marketing
One of the things we love about this time of year is the chance to reflect and get some perspective.
Who better to bring that perspective than Daryl Wright, Principal Analyst at Forrester. Daryl dropped by The CMO Show studio to chat 2023 marketing trends, forecasts and staying ahead of the curve.
GenAI, big data, hyper personalisation – they're all technologies at the vanguard of modern marketing, shaping the connections we build with customers - or so we’re told.
For many marketers, it’s still early days. Understanding how and when to lean in to these technologies can be tricky at best and downright risky at worst.
So, with a New Year just a stone’s throw away, we thought it was time to drill down into what we learned in 2023 and the challenges and opportunities forecast 2024.
To help us along we’re joined by Daryl Wright, Principal Analyst at Forrester, who shares his insights on what it actually means to be ‘customer-first’ in today’s marketing landscape.
“Traditionally, most organisations have thought largely about themselves and thinking about customers as acquisition targets or leads. That needs to change,” says Daryl.
“It’s a mindset change for marketers to think about customers as people, and to think of their whole journey – they have needs right across their lifecycle, and you need to align yourself with their lifecycle for true retention.”
Of course, it wouldn’t be a conversation about the future without touching on GenAI, so we look at some of the ways it can be implemented across the customer journey.
“Conversational AI systems give a lot more immediacy and relevancy to customers. It’s higher performance – it means that customers don’t have to search as hard. They can ask questions directly and get the answers that they need,” says Daryl.
Be sure to hit play on our final episode of the year for more razor sharp insights and forecasts for 2024. Happy listening!
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Credits
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The CMO Show production team
Producers – Rian Newman & Pamela Obeid
Audio Engineers – Ed Cheng & Daniel Marr
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Transcript:
Hello, Mark Jones here and you’re listening to The CMO Show, a podcast by ImpactInstitute made for and made by marketing professionals.
Gen AI, VR, hyper personalisation – they're all technologies at the vanguard of modern marketing, shaping the connections we build with customers - or so we’re told.
For many marketers, it’s still early days with these technologies. Understanding how and when to lean in can be tricky at best and downright risky at worst.
So, with a New Year just a stone’s throw away, it’s time to drill down into the challenges and opportunities forecasted for 2024 and explore how we can get smart and strategic in our marketing efforts.
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Mark Jones here. Thanks for joining me.
One of the things I love about this time of year is the chance to reflect and get some perspective. Regular listeners might recall that in years past I’ve done a bit of a monologue, sharing my highlights from 2023.
Well, this time I’m switching it up with conversation. I invited Daryl Wright, Principal Analyst at Forrester to talk about the year that was, and how CMOs can think more strategically about their roles.
Daryl brings a wealth of experience in B2B marketing, having worked for more than 25 years at organisations like LexisNexis and Deloitte.
We could have gone on all day, but we capped it to one episode. Let’s get into it.
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Mark Jones:
Daryl, great to have you with us in the studio today.
Daryl Wright:
Thanks for having me. I'm very, very pleased to be here.
Mark Jones:
I got to say, I have been looking forward to our conversation for a little while now. You and I go back a little bit in terms of previous, I guess, client work, right?
Daryl Wright:
Long time, yeah. I was thinking it's 10 plus years, I think.
Mark Jones:
Yeah. See? Old school's the best school.
Daryl Wright:
Absolutely.
Mark Jones:
So the reason for bringing you on the show is to talk all things marketing. And this actually is a bit of a different take for me because this time of year I normally do a bit of a monologue, State of the Union CMO Show style what happened during the year. But I thought given our recent conversations, it'd be a nice way to think about this in a different way, have a bit of a chat about what happened in 2023 and maybe some of the predictions or expectations that we had of the year. What changed? So it's a bit of a different take. But before we get into the actual bit, briefly, just tell us a bit about yourself.
Daryl Wright:
Okay. So look, I'm a principal analyst at Forrester as you point out. So what does that even mean? So really we call it research and advisory role. So I do primary research, surveys, write reports, those sorts of things. But my main job really is advising clients, CMOs, heads of demand, heads of ABM and those kinds of things globally, even though I'm based in Sydney, on essentially how they can do their marketing better. And we've got clients all over the place doing that, and people come with all sorts of things that they're looking to achieve and we help them to deliver those things.
Mark Jones:
So one of my favourite questions of anybody in marketing is, what gets you out of bed in the morning? What's the thing that you love about the role? What do you love about the way marketing works?
Daryl Wright:
It's got to be the clients, hasn't it, right? I mean, and interesting problems. I'm going to admit, in a job like this, you have to be a super nerd at best. And the complexity of the environment that we're finding ourselves in, the nature and interest in the problems that people have and to be able to help them meet their goals. I mean, yeah, that's what keeps me going.
Mark Jones:
Love it. Tell me about what you've seen this year in conversations with CMOs. You're the guy they call in when they've got questions, problems, right?
Daryl Wright:
Exactly, exactly. Look, I mean, and it is probably a question of transition, I would say, between 2022 and 2023. So 2022 was, that was the bounce year. We're out of COVID, a lot of things were moving up, people put on staff, people put on a much bigger marketing programmes. Budgets were expanding globally. We were seeing that and head counts were generally going up. I think what most people saw and certainly most people felt was what didn't last. That was a spurt post-COVID and that was being pulled back. I think one of the things that we did see last year was a big focus on the customer.
And one of the things that we've been looking at this year, and certainly I've been focused on, is focusing people back on the customer, that budgets have slightly pulled back and those sorts of things.
Mark Jones:
Is the focus on customer a proxy for customer retention?
Daryl Wright:
So retention is a key part of this. And look, a large part of people's revenue streams are retention-based. And I think this is the thing that people tend to forget is that new acquisition is often around about 20% of people's annual revenue streams. The other 80% is made up by retention, upsell and cross-sell. And the two, I don't know, orphan children of marketing in many ways is upsell and cross-sell motions. And particularly as you're going into certainly harder times, recessionary times, your customer is your friend. And there isn't typically enough focus on those different opportunity types and driving programs to run those.
Mark Jones:
So is there an unspoken idea here that for the longest time we've really focused on the 20% either intellectually or academically or however you want to call it, strategically, and just taken for granted to the, maybe it's just not as interesting that sort of keeping your customers, right? Of course they're there. We'll take you for granted. I'm going to do the fun stuff and create a new campaign.
Daryl Wright:
Yeah. Look, and I think definitely that seems to be the case. And I think the big shift though as well apart from... Part of this is about thinking inside out and outside in kind of thing. So traditionally most organisations have thought largely about themselves and why they're driving, thinking about customers as acquisition targets, their leads or whatever. That needs to change. And it's a mindset change for marketers to think about customers one as people, but also think about their whole journey. They're not just a single purchase, and this goes into the from the inside view, you're still a business, still got to make money, so you still think about acquisition, upsell, cross-sell and retention sort of motions. But they have needs right across their own lifecycle that you could potentially meet and help them with. And you need to align yourself with their lifecycle and match what they're doing in that way and follow that through.
When you point that out to people say, "Oh, yes, but the mandate from the top is to grow the business." I say, "Well, yeah, acquisition is, yes, definitely you've got to do acquisition, but it's only going to be a part of that growth." And to ignore the rest of it is a bit of an issue. Now if you talk to some of the bigger businesses, they're clearly not ignoring it, it often disappears from marketing and it goes into customer success and these sorts of things, but they tend to be focused very much on retention activities, customer success types sorts of metrics. They're often not particularly focused on growth in those accounts. And there's a lot of money being left on the table to be honest.
Mark Jones:
So what's the connection between that and customer experience, or CX, to use the jargon because that's actually been a pretty recurrent theme that I've observed this year. A lot of marketers, and I'm talking also at the client face, the work that I'm doing, have really been thinking about not just customer journey, but what's the experience of that journey. In other words, how well engaged are we, how well do we actually know what they're thinking and feeling. Like a really sort of almost like a desire to go even deeper with understanding these humans. And I haven't seen that degree of focus in years past.
Daryl Wright:
Yeah, I would absolutely agree. And it's definitely an area of research that we're focusing on. And this goes to the crux of my earlier point about people wanting to align with the customer or needing to align with the customer. There are a lot of people starting to pick up on that. And they realise that a lot of the revenue is going to come from those organisations. But of course it's becoming an arms race. Your ability to personalise, customise, optimise the experience for somebody is really just there for the taking, right? And if you don't take it, the next guy's going to. I think to some extent it's as simple as that. I suppose one of the things that I've often found is interesting that we talk about CX often as a separate discipline, and that is, but I think it's something like 60% of CMOs actually own customer experience inside their organisation.
So there's often been quite a strong alignment between the two areas. I think it's taken in recent times a shift in buyer expectations, and that's that partnership component wanting to be treated as individuals, not wanting to be followed around in a creepy kind of way. They're concerned about their data. But there's a lot of people and so that you are trying to keep a lot of people happy. And it's not just pushing things out to them, it's actually nurturing that entire experience as you go on.
Mark Jones:
And maybe an example is in the consumer space where the packaging of a product itself is part of the experience. That's what I've always loved about unboxing an Apple product for example. I don't know if there's other who doesn't. And maybe in B2B, I'm not quite sure what the parallel example would be.
Daryl Wright:
Yeah. Well, I mean these days obviously it's mostly about the onboarding. So if you're thinking of a funnel, and we call it a waterfall, it is that bottom end, the hourglass is out really. And it's all of those activities that allow for that onboarding, for the training, for that experience to actually take hold. And traditionally that side of things hasn't been well-focused on in a lot of organisations and now it's become table stakes and there's an expectation. And so people will walk on those renewals.
Mark Jones:
Now we have to talk about GenAI.
Daryl Wright:
Of course, we do.
Mark Jones:
It's borderline swear word, I think, or a drinking game maybe, I don't know, this year, right? I've been at events where they're like, we have to talk about GenAI. Am I not wrong?
Daryl Wright:
Yeah, no, you're not wrong. You're not wrong. You're not wrong. We've got not another presentation on GenAI.
Mark Jones:
If I can quote or refer to one of your colleagues, Laura Ramos, one of the VPs in the States. Is she in the States?
Daryl Wright:
Yes, she's in the States.
Mark Jones:
She talked about one in five new product launches will be the product of insights generated by AI. And I think that's interesting, which is in life and strategy, I love the idea of, "I don't know what I don't know," or, "Tell me what I don't know." And it seems like GenAI has started to play that role for marketers, product managers, entrepreneurs, innovators, et cetera, et cetera. Is that a fair kind of state of play for the year or is there something else more interesting than that?
Daryl Wright:
I think that is definitely an interesting point, and I think my concern with it though is that there's an issue of how people perceive the output of GenAI. So what Laura's saying is absolutely right. The question is what type of GenAI or AI system is that coming from? And what I mean by that is that essentially there is no AI. So essentially it's computational statistics essentially is what it is. There is nobody inside doing any actual thinking. It's putting together information. So it's as good as the information you put into it.
Mark Jones:
It's not sentient.
Daryl Wright:
It's not sentient, regardless of what our Tesla friends would tell us or any others.
Mark Jones:
They're a bubble burster.
Daryl Wright:
I know, I know. It's a shock. It really is a bit of a surprise.
Mark Jones:
That's like the cloud by the way, which is somebody else's computer.
Daryl Wright:
It is just somebody else's computer. This is just a telephone line between you and the next one. I know it's all smoke and mirrors in the end. What she's really saying is that if you are using your own data, building your own models or using systems that allow you to enrich, say, a third-party data sets with your own data, then you can really derive quite amazing insights from that using these techniques. The thing to be aware, of course, is the term is hallucination, is that the problem with the system like this is they always come up with an answer regardless of whether it's right or wrong.
Mark Jones:
So is this garbage in, garbage out?
Daryl Wright:
It's absolutely garbage in, garbage out.
Mark Jones:
So I've got a really great insight from all this garbage, which is that I have lots of garbage.
Daryl Wright:
Right, exactly. Look, and I think for me, this is where I think GenAI has been confident. We discussed earlier that we're both old, possibly, as old as each other, but we've seen this before to some extent. And as much as that people talk about predictive systems, which essentially is what this is, and expecting some magic that is just going to happen just by turning the thing on. And on so many levels, that's not true. One of the biggest areas that people need to be concerned about is the data that they push into those systems 'cause it simply will not deliver what you need to unless you've got a great data. But it goes along the board as well. So I mean she's talking about using it in a particular way. And a lot of people, when I speak to them, what they get confused a little bit about, and I think it's forgotten, but we want to remind them that they're okay, it's just another piece of technology.
The marketing world is littered with point solution, new whiz bang bits of technology which people aren't using. GenAI has the potential for that if not used well.
Mark Jones:
I go back to the customer piece, which is what can it tell me about my customers? And there is an aspiration that we're getting closer to the one-to-one idea of marketing, the nirvana of me talking to each customer at scale in a one-to-one way that's meaningful and relevant, right? But, I don't know what's the but.
Daryl Wright:
Yeah, I don't actually think there is a but. And I think it's, I mean, particularly conversational sort of AI systems, your chatbots and those kinds of things, I mean, there's an enormous amount of work being done to enrich those quite dramatically. And look, one of the examples, I was talking to a large vendor and they were talking about it in terms of from, most organisations have a large complex product sets. If you're calling into a help desk, an individual, they're going to try their hardest, but they can't know everything.
But with a system like this, they're not having to search for something. They can ask the question directly and it will construct it for them. And so you're getting a lot more immediacy, relevancy, and those sorts of things directly for engaging with your customers. So that essentially is the nub of the promise for this is higher performance. And the way we tend to think about it, if you're thinking about implementing your own technologies is at the moment we tend to think about broadly that revenue tech stack, as we tend to call it, at the centre. A lot of people think that really is automation, it's all about processes, it's all about that type of performance.
Mark Jones:
Yeah, it's a classic sort of efficiency productivity story, right?
Daryl Wright:
Yeah, but it's more than that because in the current environment you can distribute things more broadly in these sorts of things. Now with GenAI, of course, it can start to create a lot of the content and the information that is going to be needed to do that scaling, but also it can take insight in, change that on the fly. And so one of the big things that we're seeing in the market is that traditional programmes of activity or campaigns, as a lot of people call, we think of campaigns differently as a multi-year sort of thematic, which is needs based, and then programs on means like demand and reputation, demands underneath.
But those programs of activity have become less performant essentially with time because they're quite static, they don't take account of what's going on. And to increase the performance of those, you're hitting a wall with that. GenAI is going to help a lot with that because it'll allow you to be more adaptive. Now you can generate content as well on the fly, not just predict what might happen, but actually then respond to that with insight. Google's more recent model is going to help dramatically with that, and I think that's a really interesting thing to call out as a big step change. Everybody talks ChatGPT and that sort of model, thinks text or they think DALL-E, they think images. Google's new environment, Gemini, is going to be really interesting because they call it multimodal. I think that's the big leap, and that'll probably be the next part of the arms race is because, now, when you ask it a question, it can think video and audio and text all simultaneously.
Mark Jones:
And so you choose the output that you want as opposed to...
Daryl Wright:
Well, it can create videos with all of those components combined or website pages, all of those components combined. So all of a sudden now, you're in a position where you can generate that content that's going to be more fit for purpose, but right across the spectrum in one hit, and it's not somebody constructing all of these components. And so it's pushing more towards that automation.
Mark Jones:
Yeah. The AI arms race is something that I, as an armchair expert, I love watching Microsoft and Google and others fight it out. I wonder what impact is all this having on budgets. So in the conversations that you've had in sort of broad terms, marketers and CMOs either seeing budgets decrease or increase or they're having to reallocate it in certain ways. I know that's a very broad question, but what's the connection to GenAI if there is one?
Daryl Wright:
Look, right now, people aren't talking that. I mean, the budget question at the moment is recessional pressures. That's on top of everybody's mind. But look, the perception is, I think, I mean, it's going to be interesting to see how this all plays out because all of the vendors you talk to, they're in the process of pushing GenAI type technologies into their systems.
I think the logic though for most marketers I talked at the moment is this is about not reducing budgets, but if you're keeping a steady state is how do you enhance what you're doing? And that's certainly the gamble. I suspect we'll see a bit of both as you do with most of these things over time.
Mark Jones:
What's been the role of the CMO in all of this with relation to their sales teams? The integration with sales, which it's not a new trend, but there's been an acceleration of collaboration with sales and also product marketing. A number of the interviews that I've done this year, I'm thinking of Kimberly Clark for example. The amount of integration with product development was quite significant, and that's an ongoing trend, these sort of blurry lines between what used to be traditional corporate silos.
Daryl Wright:
Right. Right. Yeah, look, silos are dead. Silos are dead. And by that I don't necessarily mean that functions, that marketing functions disappear and sales and things disappear, but their alignment becomes much more lockstep than it ever has been.
And look, we would say that we have this idea, this concept of a customer-obsessed growth engine. And a big part of that is that aligned between marketing, sales, and product and then technology. And of course technology is the tie that ties all of these things together, obviously, these processes and people and those sorts of things. But what allows this to happen at scale, particularly for large multinationals who are moving potentially large customers across jurisdictions and all this sort of thing, is the technology that allows you to tie all of that together.
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Mark Jones:
What about the for purpose impact, brand reputation, otherwise known as social licence to operate this year? Just to change tact a little bit. As I think about some of the other concurrent trends that we've been a part of. And I know that most of your work is in that sort of tech, the way that we create all of the systems and processes. But there's an underlying, I think, dissatisfaction that we haven't done enough in marketing. 'Cause if you're responsible for brand and reputation and story and really creating value, because ultimately people buy something of value, it's like we haven't gone far enough yet. That's one of my takes for this year.
Daryl Wright:
Yeah, I think there's been a big awakening, I think. We're concerned about the environment. A lot of your ability to purchase, I mean if you've ever bought some technology in a big organisation or try to sell it in, you're going to run into the procurement function and all of the things that you need to be across. So whether it's slavery, whether it's environmental standards, whatever it happens to be. So they've become table stakes for most organisations. And look, signalling that out and understanding on the other way. So the signals coming back in. And if you think about it, it's like, particularly senior executives who are doing buying, do you understand what their interests are? We see this a lot particularly because one of the big shifts has been, and we're talking about buy changes, big shift to millennials being involved in buying processes. Now, I hate to say because I'm not a millennial, I'm a Gen X.
Mark Jones:
Yeah. Snap. Yeah.
Daryl Wright:
But we are just, certainly the research shows we haven't historically been as concerned about these things, but now the majority of buyers in buying groups in B2B organisations are Gen Z and millennials. So that is the predominant space. If you're a CMO and you're not focusing on those audiences and their interest and their interests shift. They want so things to be environmentally friendly. They want diversity and inclusion. They want all of these things. They are just, "Well, that's how we live. Now that's what we expect." If you are not on that page and you're not able to demonstrate that, you're not going to get the deal.
Mark Jones:
Right. And for the record, I might be Gen X, but we're also a B Corp.
Daryl Wright:
Yes. It's not everybody obviously.
Mark Jones:
Stay relevant. Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, I think it's really important because I think there has been a fascinating evolution of the way that we conceive of the relationship between brands and customers. And you mentioned signals. There has been this idea of how do I track the untrackable, and this is a little bit existential. But we look at signals in social and we've got more and more sophisticated over time. We're expecting GenAI to do a bit more of that heavy lifting. And then we are wanting to understand the customer psyche in new ways so that I can get more strategic about how I'm almost shaping this brand and what we do in the years to come. So that's occupied a lot of time for marketers. It's almost like they're taking the automation story for granted, right? We've got the stack running, now what?
Daryl Wright:
Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of just pushing more emails out the front door, isn't there, sort of going on. So, yes, that has to stop, I think, is what we're agreeing on. And it is a real problem that particularly when people are very focused on demand and driving the next level of leads, people have measured against sourcing metrics and those sorts of things. But in many ways that's kind of a naive view because as we've just been discussing, essentially, the interests that people have is what's going to drive that engagement and growth really now is about that engagement. If you're not mastering engagement, you're not going to be driving the growth of your business.
Now you can only tell some of that through our current focuses on digital and those sorts of channels. It can't hurt to go back to some of the old school sort of stuff, focus groups, user boards, surveys. And I think the push towards wanting enormous scale from technology and just driving a machine that way, you can lose the person in that, you can lose the client in that, and that's where the shift needs to be.
Mark Jones:
So we have these dynamics then in marketing, it's the pendulum swings between being hugely emotive and driven by purpose and inspiration through to the sort of cold, hard, drive the leads, all that sort of stuff, and then trying not to lose our humanity in the whole mix of it, right?
Daryl Wright:
Right. Yeah.
Mark Jones:
How well do you think tech is keeping up at a day-to-day level? And by that I mean the grind, right? Because a lot of marketing, the unsexy part of marketing is the grind. Emails, reporting, stacks that don't talk to other stacks. The percentage of your tech that you don't use.
Daryl Wright:
Right.
Mark Jones:
How much have we made progress this year on some of those really fundamentals? I wonder also with the inspiration, we've lost a bit of the core drive of how marketing works.
Daryl Wright:
Yeah, look, there has been a shift back or a pullback is probably a better way of putting it from just buying the next shiny thing because that's adding a lot to the problem. It's almost that the technology itself has become part of the work rather than the solution to the work. And I think we were talking before about point solutions in particular. During COVID, a number of technology solutions that people put on was very, very high. Everybody was panicking, particularly a lot of people in the B2B land didn't have e-commerce solutions for example. And they had to work how to talk to their clients and they didn't have a lot of that tech in place and it certainly wasn't all joined up. I think the reality is now that most people overbought quite a lot of that technology.
The obvious question is, so what should you be cutting out? I think the right answer to that is, again, build for a need, understand what your objectives are, understand what you're trying to achieve, really understand the requirements of the business and where you need to be competitive and where you can show difference in things you just need to automate. Build out your solutions in that way and review in that way. Audit your environments and decide to migrate off these sort of technologies.
It's going to be really interesting this year because of the GenAI stuff coming in. What is that going to mean? I think what a lot of people are missing is that GenAI is going to change the work. It's not just going to enhance that, it's going to change the work.
Mark Jones:
In other words, how you do the work?
Daryl Wright:
No. What work, what you do. We have this phrase we say which, "It raises the floor but not the ceiling." So it increases the productivity, but the creativity still needs to be there. So it is going to enhance a lot of that. But you really need to be thinking about what's going to be coming next in the next period of time to be able to integrate with that. And again, review and audit. And it really is going to change the nature of what you actually need to do.
Mark Jones:
My sense is that you've got this increasing complexity of the solutions and tools that we can use and the sheer scale of them. And then a bit of an overreaction maybe in the other direction to sort of reject a lot of it and just stick with what you've got. And the risk on that side is that you lose a bit of a spirit of creativity, innovation. So we start thinking about next year, where do you see the new ideas coming from? Now, some of the traditional sources have always been advertising agencies and creatives, and I love that part of the world because it's brilliant. A lot of the storytelling you see out of that, just absolutely brilliant insights. But another part has been this data-driven model, which we've seen come and go, which is data-driven marketing. There's also account-based marketing, which is in vogue again in some corporates because they're saying, "Hang on a minute, retention, customer experience, we really need to dig in to that." So what's your broad take on some of those big bucket areas you reckon?
Daryl Wright:
Yeah. I think one of the things that we've been seeing for a number of years, and you talk about account-based marketing and that sort of side of things is that it's convergence. And most of the people we talk to is in terms of demand marketing and account-based marketing. The distinctions between them are disappearing. And the reason for that is that largely is because the technology now allows you to, essentially, for demand marketers to act like account-based marketers. That's really the reality of it. I mean everybody would love as a marketer to be able to treat every single customer bespoke programs, individual white glove experience.
Of course the reality is that that's very challenging. Certainly, if you want to be able to do things at scale, tech now allows you to do a lot of this. That personalization, that customization, you can drive the insight and all of that. And that allows really the two of those to combine. When we ask people, that's where quite a lot of people are headed. And probably I think it's like 30 or 40% would say that there's not a lot of distinction between the two now. And certainly, in my experience in Asia-Pacific, the big portion because of some of these trends has been particularly into what we call named account-based marketing, which really is a one-to-few type approach to account-based marketing.
Daryl Wright:
And now you want to be able to personalise. And of course traditional account-based marketing, the white glove treatment, where maybe you're looking at two or three big accounts to one marketer, obviously can't scale that. You're able to do that with an approach like that. That means that I'm seeing in certain of clients where they're largely dropping a lot of their demand programs at the bottom end. They're still running brand programs, so reputation programs right across the board to mop that up, but they're just not seeing the performance out of a broad demand activation exercise. So traditionally what you'd be doing is coupling a reputation and a demand activity, but together. And so they'd be running their reputation typically underneath, they'd be running some kind of then sort of activation. So maybe they're hooking it up with some kind of pull through, some kind of offer about that particular point in time to time.
Mark Jones:
Download my white paper.
Daryl Wright:
It's a bit of that sort of side of things. A lot of people find that just too broad, so they're spending a lot of effort producing that. The return on that's relatively low. On top of funnel pull through, you're looking at about 8% on programs at best or across all kind of types. And the demand programs tends to be a lot smaller than that as well. So again, that push to get return on investment where you can get a much more targeted, much more insights-driven interaction with known clients that are in your target space because you've done the persona work, you've done the run the firm in the form of graphics, you understand how they all match up. Let's just talk to those guys, right?
Mark Jones:
So, in other words, there's less wastage going on, and increasingly so.
Daryl Wright:
Yeah, and increasingly so. And look, we're talking about GenAI and those sorts of technologies. The reason that we're so excited about that is because the promise of being able to do a lot of what we've been talking about, their personalization and insights and bespoke programmes that adapt to the end client at scale is going to be so much more possible than it ever has been. Coming to a system near you soon kind of thing.
Mark Jones:
So thinking about next year, how do we keep up? You miss a few days of reading the news in the GenAI space, for example, and you suddenly, you've not realised that Google's got a whole new thing as you've just discussed today, and that's just one area. From a CMO leadership perspective, what do you think is going to really make the difference between the high-performing CMOs and the people who are keeping the lights on?
Daryl Wright:
I mean, right at that top level I'm going to say that customer-obsessed growth engine. And look, when we do our research particularly around this, is that those sort of factors about aligning with the customer organisations that do that outperform their peers every time when they're consuming that knowledge and responding to that is part of their programme. So that's the big thing.
Be aware of the changes with your buyers, the generational changes and the other shifts in terms of how they want to buy. You need to be in front of all of that. The technology is, I mean, I said the technology is great. I love a bit of technology and it allows us to do all these sorts of things, but getting those objectives, understanding your customer, getting your teams lined up and performing, removing those barriers inside your organisation, the technology will help you deliver all of that. But a lot of it is about that side of things.
Mark Jones:
Just briefly, you mentioned Asia Pacific, and we have listeners across the region and in fact the world, but are there any particular changes that you notice in different countries and the way that you're seeing them respond to this customer obsession in particular?
Daryl Wright:
Yeah. Across the region, and I'll just say this to my, I work for an American business, I like to say to my American colleagues is that Asia Pacific is not a place.
Mark Jones:
Hence my question about countries.
Daryl Wright:
It's multiple different countries now. Look, whenever I look at the data, Australia in particular, Australia and New Zealand, tend to behave pretty much like the United States and Western Europe. Interesting there's very little differences in behaviour in terms of the buyers, the maturity of the market, the things that we find important in terms of buying processes. Those sorts of things are very well aligned. When you step out of that, they tend to be changes. So in, I suppose Singaporean, those sorts of markets and that sort of Southeast Asian sorts of markets, the buying groups are much bigger, tend to be more senior, and the length of time that people take is longer to actually buy things.
But also as well, actually, the Millennials make up 80% of the buyers. So there's a real shift there. Unfortunately, some of the things we've been talking about in terms of diversity and inclusion environment, those sort of factors don't tend to factor as much in that part of the world. And different places like India as well, they have a completely different profile.
Daryl Wright:
It's really quite a challenging kind of space. Certainly coming from the outside. I mean we have analysts in India because it's such a big market and it's growing so incredibly quickly and it's different to the Western market. So you need to really, really understand if you marketing into it.
Mark Jones:
I think if we connect a couple of dots there, which is really that customer obsession, you've got to take a very specific focus on it in different markets, in different regions and get a very clear picture of the differences because the days of one message for everybody, that's difficult to sustain. So yeah, interesting to see how that unfolds. Well, look, we have covered quite a bit of territory.
Daryl Wright:
We have.
Mark Jones:
I reckon if they let us keep the microphones running, we could cover quite a bit more. So maybe we'll have to press pause and come back again. But can I just thank you so much, Daryl, for joining me on the show for a chat about where we've been and where we're going. It's a fascinating space and I appreciate particularly the insight you've got there around how we're starting to see a different view of GenAI and also how we can start thinking about different priorities and not get too caught up in the 80-20, maybe focus a bit more on the 80 and less on the 20. It'll be interesting to see how it unfolds next year.
Daryl Wright:
That'd be fantastic. Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak.
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That was my conversation with Daryl Wright, Principal Analyst at Forrester.
It was a great reminder about our customers, who should always be at the crux of all the decisions we make – particularly given the rapid changes we’re experiencing across technology, social and economic domains.
It’s a great mentality to take into 2024, and I thoroughly enjoyed looking back on the year that was. I hope you did too.
A huge thank you to Daryl for joining me on today’s episode, and thank you for listening.
That’s a wrap on 2023 – we'll catch you next year after we’ve put our heels up for a bit. Happy holidays!