What marketers say about working online: McKinsey Global Survey results

Mckinsey released their global survey results, I'm gonna share with you some excerpts:

The online survey was in the field from October 11 to October 21, 2011, and garnered responses from 792 marketing executives representing the full range of industries, regions, titles, and company sizes. The data are weighted by the contribution of each respondent’s nation to global GDP to adjust for differences in response rates.

Marketers agree that digital tools and technologies are valuable, though many of their companies struggle to measure the financial impact and capture customer data.

November 2011

Digital media and online tools: (...) Most respondents agree that their online presence is important and that digital tools provide their companies with a major opportunity, but few are taking the structural steps required to benefit from selling online or engaging consumers through new technologies such as social media. Indeed, most respondents indicate that companies are still trying to figure out how digital media can meaningfully improve their bottom lines.(...)

The most pressing competitive challenge marketing executives identify is producing and using customer insights, and respondents hope to use data to drive sales and customer engagement. But they also say their companies often have only basic customer information— despite the tremendous increase in data available to them in recent years—and they report difficulties in measuring the impact of online tools and channels. Respondents also say they lack the internal leadership and resources to develop better analytical capabilities and, as a result, better information and insights about customers.

The state of play online - Marketing executives overwhelmingly agree that an effective online presence is very or extremely important for staying competitive—81 percent of them say so. (...)   about half as many cite either the ability to reach new customer segments or the emergence of new business models as one of the greatest effects of digital media’s pervasiveness. Overall, these tools seem to be creating little competitive differentiation.

Marketers’ online challenges - The most important digital-related challenge for marketers and business leaders—ranked first by the largest share of respondents—is generating and leveraging deep customer insights (Exhibit 3). The good news is that more respondents say their companies either are taking or plan to take action on some of the higher-ranked challenges compared with those they ranked lower (Exhibit 4). Notably, many companies seem to want to do it themselves: on many of these challenges, more respondents say the best approaches involve developing internal capabilities rather than relying on external resources.(...)

(...)Though measuring the effect of online tools isn’t the most-cited problem, other responses indicate that many marketers continue to struggle with developing the right metrics and translating insights into actions that influence consumer behavior. (...)

Marketers and big data - Congruent with the importance respondents place on leveraging customer insights, 71 percent say data-driven customer insights will be very or extremely important to their companies’ competitiveness during the next two to four years—but just 4 percent say their companies now have the required analytical capabilities to manage their businesses more effectively (Exhibit 6).

Looking ahead

Most companies are struggling to define an online business model to drive competitive advantage, despite being well aware of the importance of digital media and its potential to foster customer engagement and loyalty. That’s partly because there’s no single solution: companies need to consider factors such as the extent to which digital operations should be integrated within existing commercial functions, whether it should be centralized or regionally based, and how much online activity should be standardized rather than tailored by geography, product, or service. Yet even though one size does not fit all, companies need to begin searching for what works for them. 

Few companies are taking full advantage of the opportunity presented by exponentially increasing volumes of customer data. Insights derived from how consumers behave and interact online can inform everything from product development and innovation to sales processes, but it requires a commitment to gathering, analysing, and deploying data much more effectively than most companies currently do. 

The race is far from over. While companies recognize the potential of digital tools to drive customer engagement and sales, few have seized the opportunity: only 14 percent of respondents say the effects of digital tools in marketing have included the entry of new competitors. Yet it’s only a matter of time before disruptive competitors that skillfully use digital tools quickly emerge, and incumbents need to take aggressive action before a lot of current value is destroyed.

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