Marketing

Chief Marketing Officers are suffering from an intense case of FOMO – the Fear of Missed Opportunities – as customers seek more localized, personalized experiences that are relevant to their own cultural context and situation. There is ample reason to understand the anxiety: Only 10 percent of brand leaders are feeling exceedingly confident they will be able to reach their customer engagement and revenue goals.

Assume the people you consider to be the most loyal customers on the planet are, in fact, disloyal. Because 92% of the time, you’ll be right. New Nielsen findings demonstrate that just 8% of consumers consider themselves to be firmly committed loyalists.

With little sign of a slowdown in growth, Amazon has become the world’s most valuable brand, according to the 2019 BrandZTM Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands ranking released by WPP and Kantar at the New York Stock Exchange.

In this episode of the McKinsey Podcast, Simon London speaks with McKinsey senior expert Biljana Cvetanovski and partner Jason Heller about the next chapter of marketing, which is focused on digital—across many touchpoints—and the role of the chief marketing officer (CMO) as the architect of a company’s growth engine.

The disruption that has upended the retail, tech and media industries has reached consumer products relatively late, but it is hitting the industry with full force (see Figure 1). Among the most dramatic examples of what’s at stake: The entries of Harry’s and Dollar Shave Club led to a market share drop from 70% in 2010 to 54% in 2016 at Gillette, which also saw an average 12% price decrease in 2017.

While there may be no end in sight to the insurgent brands invasion, signs of hope are on the horizon for the large, established consumer goods companies that have been battling insurgents in the war for growth.