From Insight To Foresight | CMO REPORT- 大数跨境

电通创意

2024-09-19

导读：Marketers are facing increasing pressure to anticipate changing trends and behaviors.

In a volatile world, marketers are facing increasing pressure to anticipate changing trends and behaviors. Many are turning to AI and Machine Learning to anticipate trends before they are visible to the mainstream, and a key responsibility facing marketing departments is the ability to bring new trends and foresight to the business.

When asked to consider the biggest challenges facing them and their teams, understanding and responding to changing consumer behavior is a challenge for 82% of marketers, with 40% describing it as a significant challenge. 80% describe staying ahead of changing technologies as a challenge, 38% of whom find it a significant challenge. 79% agree with the statement “I am increasingly expected to use data to provide insight on consumers today but also predict future products and propositions.”

Our Dentsu Consumer Vision 2035 report reveals that customers have similar expectations: “77% of global consumers “would welcome brands being able to anticipate or predict what they want and proactively offer relevant and helpful products and services”.

More broadly, data and insight challenges are hampering clients’ ability to embrace the full potential of personalization and contextual relevance. 78% of CMOs find it a challenge to deliver personalized marketing at scale, with 77% struggling to own the customer relationship in a world where third parties from retailers to technology platforms often seem to hold more power.

These challenges are especially troubling in light of CMO’s key strategic priorities: personalized and data-driven marketing is their number one strategic priority, followed by the ability to build 1:1 relationships and to leverage AI for insight and targeting.

“Understand the consumer/market trends” is identified as the primary role of marketing by 42% of respondents, ahead even of driving business growth at 41%. Japan, the UK and Mexico are most likely to define understanding the future as their primary role, while Canada, Australia, Brazil, Italy and Spain prioritize growth.

In response, marketers are investing in data and insight, with 59% of CMOs claiming to use AI and Machine Learning to predict change in consumer behaviors, 58% investing in social listening to anticipate changes in sentiment and others engaging communities in a process of insight gathering and co-creation.

Predicting the future is an intriguing – and often highly flawed – blend of sophisticated data analytics and human insight. Large language models are transforming the ways we interact with unstructured data, with potential to identify not only current trends but the emergent and high velocity trends at a scale and speed beyond what is currently possible.

Yet understanding what drives a niche trend or community with potential to scale remains a very human and manual endeavor. Cultural curiosity and connection remains a vital asset agencies can bring marketers.

The content of this article is sourced from the DENTSU CREATIVE 2024 CMO REPORT. Now in its fifth year, the annual study is conducted to provide insight into the hearts and minds of CMOs globally, to help benchmark their direction against peers, and support them developing their creative, experience and innovation roadmaps. To form the CMO Report, the responses to 45 questions posed to 950 CMOs in Australia, Brazil, China, Canada, Germany, Italy, India, Japan, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Spain, the UAE, US and UK.

Eight key themes have been identified to offer an indispensable industry toolkit and roadmap, this year calling for agencies to not only respond to briefs but also to challenge them and drive transformative change.

TO READ THE 2024 CMO REPORT IN FULL, PLEASE DOWNLOAD FROM THE DENTSU CREATIVE GLOBAL WEBSITE.

www.dentsucreative.com/news/dentsu-creative-cmo-survey-2024