Scott Brinker

The Economist Intelligence Unit is on a roll with its marketing industry research. It just released another report, sponsored by SAS, titled Outside Looking In: The CMO Struggles to Get in Sync with the C-Suite. The gist of the report, a global survey of 389 executives, is that marketing is in a period of great change, it’s becoming more strategic, and many organizations are not yet in agreement on what that means for the CMO’s …

Technical expertise is more important than agency experience for CMOs Continue Reading »

You may have heard of the recent report by the Economist Intelligence Unit, Cultivating Business-Led Innovation. The big conversation nugget that has been appearing on a number of marketing industry sites is the survey result stating that more than twice as many executives cite marketing as involved in bringing innovative ideas to market than IT. Yes, 45% of senior executives say marketing is involved in birthing innovative ideas, but only 19% say their IT teams …

Why marketing may solve the innovator’s dilemma Continue Reading »

Ashley Friedlein, the CEO of Econsultancy, has a great op-ed in Marketing Week today, Why modern marketers need to be pi-people. That’s “pi” as in the capital Greek letter pi that looks like this: Π. It’s a riff on the label “T-shaped people” that has been popularized in digital marketing over the past few years. T-shaped people have a specific expertise where they go really deep (e.g., graphic design, software development, data analytics, etc.), but …

Econsultancy’s CEO: Marketing needs pi-shaped people Continue Reading »

I’ve been advocating for marketing to lead its own technology for almost 5 years now. I believe that the splicing of code and data into the DNA of marketing is one of the big picture meta-trends of our industry. Forrester has recommended a marketing technology office within the marketing department. Recent Gartner research shows that 72% of high-tech marketers now have a chief marketing technologist role in their organizations. Even IBM is now championing the …

3 enterprises where marketing leads marketing technology Continue Reading »

Today the Content Marketing Institute, MarketingProfs, and Brighcove released a new 2013 B2B content marketing report with updated benchmarks, budgets, and trends for North America. It sheds light on the budgets, content tactics, and social distribution channels that B2B marketers are using to build brand awareness, acquire customers, and generate leads. But one of the things I found most interesting was this: Out of the 1,416 respondents, 56% do all their content creation in-house. Even …

Good content marketing is a part of customer experience Continue Reading »

The fast-paced evolution of marketing is a sea of trends, from attribution models to the Zero Moment of Truth. So many trends, in fact, that it can be hard to keep track of them all. A meta-trend runs deeper, powering more specific trends, like a tidal force that drives waves to the shore. The following graphic illustrates five meta-trends that I believe underpin almost all of the marketing trends we see today — and new …

5 meta-trends underlying almost all of modern marketing Continue Reading »

Virginia Sharma, VP of Marketing and Communications at IBM India/South Asia, recently posted a presentation on SlideShare titled The New Profession on a Smarter Planet: Chief Marketing Technologist. The chief marketing technologist from IBM India Smarter Marketing According to Virginia, the timeless responsibilities of marketers everywhere: Knowing the customer. Defining what to market and how to market it. Protecting the brand promise. …are evolving into three imperatives for a new profession: Understanding each customer as …

IBM champions the chief marketing technologist Continue Reading »