Christine Moorman is the Director of The CMO Survey and the T. Austin Finch, Sr. Professor of Business Administration, The Fuqua School of Business, Duke University.

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Do Marketers Know What They Want From Social Media?

March 17th, 2013

Social media spending as a percentage of marketing budgets will more than double over the next five years according to new results from The CMO Survey. Responses from 468 top marketers in February indicate that companies are spending 8.4 percent of their budgets on social media. Over the next year, that number is expected to increase to 11.5 percent, and in the next five years it will reach 21.6 percent.

Looking back to the first time I asked these questions in August 2009, the levels were 3.5 percent of current budgets and expected to increase to 6.1 percent over the next year and 13.7 percent over the next five years. The increase in current spending from 3.5 percent to 8.4 percent alone represents a 140 percent increase in the last 3 years. No other part of the marketing budget has grown so much in such a short amount of time. In fact, during the same time period, traditional advertising has continued to plummet. It was decreasing by 7.9 percent per year three years ago and continues to drop 2.7 percent in the current year.

The dramatic increases in social media spending were universal across different business sectors: B2B-product, B2B-services, B2C-products, and B2C-services. The B2C-product sector, which includes companies such as Procter & Gamble and The Coca-Cola Company, expects the most dramatic increase, from 9.6 percent to 24.6 percent (see Table 1). (more…)

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In Search of Marketing Excellence: Ten Differences Between High-Performing and Low-Performing Companies

January 16th, 2013

Marketing excellence—marketing leaders strive to attain it and marketing professors try to dissect it. For the first time, The CMO Survey-August 2012 asked top marketers “How would you rate your company’s marketing excellence?” on a 7-point scale where 7=one of the best in the world, 6=a leader but not one of the best, 5=strong, 4=good, 3=fair, 2=weak, 1=very weak. The mean score was 4.4 (standard deviation=1.4). Figure 1 contains the full distribution of responses.

Figure 1. Marketing Excellence Ratings in Companies

Over time, The CMO Survey will develop a longitudinal database and provide more definitive answers to the questions surrounding marketing excellence. However, using only the August 2012 data, I can share some of the performance, spending, strategy, leadership, and organizational choices/outcomes that are and are not correlated with marketing excellence.

To generate these insights, I classified companies participating in The CMO Survey according to whether they performed above or below the mean on the marketing excellence question. The high-performing group (n=184 firms) has a mean marketing excellence score of 5.52 (s.d.=0.66) and the low-performing group (n=170 firms) has a mean marketing excellence score of 3.22 (s.d.=0.88).
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Six Reasons Marketing Budgets are on the Rise

November 1st, 2012

Marketing budgets as a percent of overall firm budgets and as a percent of firm revenues are both on the rise as noted in my prior post. Why are firms spending more on marketing? Here are six reasons I see in The CMO Survey™ data and in my research.

  1. New jobs: Marketing appears to be taking a leadership role in managing social media activities in companies. Given social media spending as a percent of marketing budgets is expected to rise from 7.6% to 18.8% over the next 5 years, this means new funds are flowing toward marketing.
  2. New skills: Companies plan to increase marketing training by 3.7% in February 2012 to 7.2% in August 2012. In particular, I see many companies in investing in programs to build marketing capabilities. A good example is GE’s Experienced Commercial Leadership Program, which develops cohorts of young marketers for the company. Another example is Becton Dickinson’s Marketing Excellence Initiative, which provides non-marketers with a big dose of training in key marketing tools and processes.
  3. New knowledge: Big Data has captured the imaginations of leaders in companies big and small. The ability to leverage information about customers in order to deliver and demonstrate value opens the door for marketers to fill the role as analysts and “data whisperers” as McKinsey calls them. As noted by McKinsey in its Chief Marketing and Sales Officer forum, “Data whisperers are those analysts who can coax meaning and insights from the increasingly sophisticated and massive data sets available today.” (more…)

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Marketing Spend on the Rise – Three Trends Worth Watching

October 19th, 2012

Results from The CMO Survey™ (August 2012) contain three indicators that marketing spend is on the rise in companies.

First and the weakest, CMOs reported that marketing spend is expected to grow by 6.4% in the next year. This number is positive, supporting my thesis, but the number is actually down from expected growth of 9.1% from August 2011. Given continued depressed firm growth and slow economic growth, this decrease is not altogether unexpected. It is positive nonetheless.

Second and more telling is the fact that marketing budgets as a percent of firm budgets increased 40% from 8.1% in February 2011 to 11.4% in August 2012. The Figure shows that this percentage has increased steadily over the last 18 months, pointing to the fact that companies are placing a greater emphasis on marketing spend relative to other types of strategic spend.

Figure. Marketing Budgets as a Percent of Firm Budgets

Third, marketing spending as a percent of firm revenues increased 30% from 8.5% in February 2012, the first time The CMO Survey™ asked the question, to 11% in August 2012.
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How Does Your Company Grow?

July 3rd, 2012

The CMO Survey has been tracking company growth strategies for four years. Respondents allocate 100 points among four well-known growth strategies to reflect what their companies have done over the last year and plan to do in the next year.

The four growth strategies are differentiated on two dimensions. The first dimension is whether the company is growing by deepening purchases from current customers or entering new markets (new from the standpoint of the company’s portfolio). The second dimension is whether the company is growing by trying to sell more of its current products and/or services or by offering new products and/or services. These two dimensions produce a 2×2 matrix of growth strategies (Table 1) called the Ansoff Growth Matrix.

Table 1. Types of Growth Strategies

Table 2 shows the percent of company expenditures for each strategy for the past 12 months and for the next 12 months. Most companies continue to grow through market penetration. This low-risk strategy usually yields more certain but lower returns. However, this number is expected to decrease. Companies are expected to take on more risk by increasing use of the remaining three growth strategies with an emphasis on product/service development (developing new offerings for existing markets) and diversification (targeting new markets with new offerings).

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Using Marketing Analytics: I Do, Therefore, I Think

May 19th, 2012

I recently reported that The CMO Survey found companies expect to increase the marketing analytics portion of their marketing budgets by 60% from 5.7% to 9.1% in the next three years. This is a monumental increase especially given that marketing budgets overall have grown only 8.3% over the last two years. While impressive, the true mark of whether marketing analytics is going live up to its expected role as a critical strategic asset cannot be measured by spending. Instead, we have to consider how marketing analytics affects what managers do and think and how well they perform.

To gauge this impact, the February 2012 CMO Survey asked top marketers to answer this question: “In what percent of your projects does your company use available or requested market analytics before a decision is made?” The average score was 37.2% (95% confidence interval: 31.5%-43%). This means that 62.8% of the time, managers are not using marketing analytics! By this measure, marketing analytics must do more. If not, its funders will place bets on other strategic weapons they believe will allow the company to serve customers better and to pull ahead of competitors.

Company Use of Marketing Analytics in Decision Making

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Spending on Marketing Analytics

March 28th, 2012

I added a special section focusing on marketing analytics to the February 2012 issue of The CMO Survey. With all the talk about “big data” and the billions of dollars companies appear to pouring into capturing, processing, and leverage customer data, I thought it would be a good idea to examine where companies are on a few key issues and also where they expect to be over time on this strategic investment.

I asked top marketers to report what percentage of their marketing budgets they spend on marketing analytics. I think this is a reasonable request given that 70% of all top marketers state that the marketing analytics group reports to them. Results indicate that companies currently spend an average of 5.7% of their marketing budgets on marketing analytics and that this number is expected to grow to 9.1% in the next three years. This 60% increase represents a sizable shift. To put it in perspective, marketing budgets overall have grown 8.3% over the last two years. This growth varies by company size and industry sector. Looking at Table 1, we can see that, in general, current marketing analytic spending levels and expected growth levels correlate with company size (measured as revenues). There is a trough near the middle for companies between $500M-$999M, but otherwise the relationship is positive and significant. Examining sector differences in Table 2, we see that services companies, overall, spend more on marketing analytics now and will remain ahead of product companies in the next three years. From these figures, service companies appear to understand the “big data” opportunity and believe they can leverage it to create more value for their customers.
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The Social Media Integration Gap

March 13th, 2012

Last week I reported on the expected increase in social media spend from an already high 7.4% of marketing budgets to 10.4% within a year and 19.5% within five years. It is therefore both interesting and somewhat disturbing that we continue to see a sizable fissure between what companies are doing with social media and what they are doing with the rest of their strategies. I asked CMOs to rate “How effectively is social media integrated with your firm’s marketing strategy” on a seven point scale where 7 is “very integrated” and 1 is “not at all integrated.” Results from The CMO Survey indicate an average score of 3.8 with a standard deviation of 2.0. Sadly, only 7 percent of respondents believe that social media is “very integrated” to the firm’s strategy while 18.4% rated social media as “not at all integrated.” The full distribution of responses is shown in Figure 1.
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Social Media Spend Continues to Soar

March 6th, 2012

Results from The CMO Survey, February 2012 indicate that marketers continue to increase spend on social media. In the next 5 years, marketers expect to spend 19.5% of their budgets on social media, almost three times more than the current level! Within a year, marketers expect to spend 10.8% of their budgets on social media. These figures deserve a deeper investigation into what has been happening over time. First, social media spend, as a percent of marketing budgets has continued to increase over the last 2.5 years I have been measuring these levels in The CMO Survey. From the initial level of 3.5% in August 2009, we have witnessed an 111% increase to the current levels at 7.4% (see Figure 1).
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Investing in Marketing Knowledge

February 21st, 2012

The CMO Survey tracks investments companies make in different kinds of marketing knowledge.  In the August 2011 survey, companies reported the following average investments: marketing training (+3.1%), marketing consulting (+3.5%), integrating what we know about marketing (+6.0%), market research and intelligence (+6.2%), and developing knowledge about how to do marketing (+6.4%).  (more…)

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