Evolving Technology and Changing Consumer Behavior a Risk to Marketing Strategies: Gartner

With Uncertainty Looming Large, Gartner Delivers a Blueprint to Get Through Marketing Unpredictability

The blueprint is essentially Gartner analysts listing six vital changes in an attempt to assist marketing leaders to be in full control of the future. The report containing these mandates is titled ‘Predicts 2019: Marketing Seeks a New Equilibrium.’ It acts as a guide to safeguard the marketing community from emerging threats such as shifting consumer behaviors, mounting regulatory pressures, organizational shifts, and disruptive automation.

“These are exciting, but uncertain times for CMOs (chief marketing officers) and marketing leaders. From the promise of data and analytics to the lure of customer experience (CX) and everything in between, marketers have vast opportunities to set themselves apart from the competition, but equal challenges to overcome in order to do so. Finding the right balance to successfully leverage marketing technology and emerging trends will be critical to marketing’s success over the course of the next couple of years,” said Charles Golvin, senior director and analyst at Gartner.

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Snapshot of Six Gartner Tenets

1. 2022 will see profitability as the alpha priority of the CMO. This automatically deprioritizes customer experience with Gartner predicting that the spend on CX will be 25 percent less than now.
2. Enterprises that ensure user-level control of marketing data will see lesser consumer churn (40%) and more lifetime value (25%) by 2023.
3. 2022 will see 30% of digital content developed by AI capabilities. This will definitely increase productivity but will see a drop in creative processes.
4. By 2023, marketing analytics teams will see downsizing by up to 50%. Gartner predicts that 60% of CMOs will have to do this because of the inability to see results.
5. By 2023, autonomous engines will trigger messaging for multichannel-marketing campaigns. This will, in turn, result in an increase in response rate by 25% as the messaging will be based on marketer criteria and real-time consumer behavior.
6. By 2023, consumers will prefer lesser video time when it comes to advertising. Brands will have to settle for short-form format while making commercials.

These six insights circle back on the issues mentioned before that marketing leaders face:

Consumer Behavior

Consumers are increasingly getting adapted to voice interfaces — thanks to their improving abilities. However, consumers are skeptical about how their data is being used. Hence, 44% of consumers will prefer a personal assistant installed on their device so that their data stays there.

Also Read: Sky Invests in Synamedia to Embrace the Future of Video

Regulatory Pressures

Legal frameworks such as GDPR had to be introduced considering the misuse of personal data. Advocates have now also joined the bandwagon of shedding light on privacy breaches of sensitive data. This is bound to make standard marketing practices obsolete.

Organizational Shifts

The marketing community overall is huge on the importance of data. This has propelled brands to hire staff that specialize in extracting meaningful insights from a large and acquired data set. Along with analytics teams, CX teams also continue to grow. However, expectations for both these teams have skyrocketed and are being subjected to intense scrutiny.

Disruptive Automation

Machine intelligence is turning out to be the latest vanguard for MarTech. This will substantially disrupt how marketers are currently strategizing and deploying their campaigns.

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