Report by the Economist Intelligence Unit, 2016

Summary:

The path to 2020: Marketers seize the customer experience is based on a global survey of 499 CMOs and senior marketing executives, plus in-depth interviews with leading CMOs. The research explores which technologies and customer trends are likely to change marketing organisations the most over the next ve years.

Marketers have spent much of the past decade working on perfecting their ability to understand the customer through personalisation. What is different about 2016 through 2020 is how CMOs are matching that understanding with direct action that drives engagement—and doing so at scale. The survey data and interviews reveal that leading CMOs are pioneering a new model that blends a deep understanding of a customer’s contextual situation with timely, tailored delivery of relevant content and marketing assets.

To illustrate this process at work, the EIU developed a framework—“The layers of engagement”—that classi es the elements that contribute to a personalised customer experience, and how it creates value for a customer and for a marketing organisation.

Other insights from the research include:

1. CMOs own the customer experience full stop. Eighty-six percent of CMOs and senior marketing executives believe they will
own the end-to-end customer experience by 2020. The EIU explored this trend last year in The rise of the marketer: Driving engagement, experience and revenue. This year’s research analysed the customer experience in terms of its role as a direct interface of a brand with its customer—everywhere, anytime and across platforms.

2. But marketing complexity is growing sharply. As customer experience overtakes mass advertising as a preferred channel to the customer, CMOs must learn to manage staggering amounts of complexity. More than half of respondents believe the accelerating pace of technology change, mobile lifestyles and an explosion of potential marketing channels via connected objects and locations will change marketing the most by 2020, driven by billions of possible interactions they create between a company and its customers.

3. Top marketing channels are those that lend themselves to personalising the customer experience. The top channels to the customer in 2020 will be social media (63% of respondents), the World Wide Web (53%), mobile apps (47%) and mobile web (46%). Publishing-centric channels like television, radio and print scored far lower.

4. Customer experience drives brand equity more than ever. CMOs are betting that a personalised, ef cient and consistent customer experience will translate into customer loyalty and brand value. Marketers listed raising customer loyalty and better brand perception as the two top bene ts (both 53%) they aim to realise through a more positive customer experience.