Marketers know it’s time to reinvent their roles, but according to a new study, they’re not ready to make the leap.
Tamara Gaffney
According to Adobe’s new Digital Roadblock report, 40% of marketers say they want to reinvent themselves, but just 14% say they know how to start the process.
Presented Tuesday at Adobe Summit in Salt Lake City, Utah, the study polled 1,000 U.S. marketers, including 424 senior level executives and CMOs, and revealed a major gap between marketers’ desires to change along with the industry and their intent to actually do so.
The majority (64%) of marketers acknowledged the pace of change, reporting they expect their role to change within the next year, but said there are major roadblocks to change, including a lack of training for new skills (30%) and corporate structures that are failing to adapt (30%).
Tamara Gaffney, principal analyst for Adobe’s Digital Index, said the major thing holding back marketers today is an aversion to failure. Gaffney pointed to a major contradiction in the report: 50% of marketers said they should take more risks, but even more – 65% – said they prefer adopting new technologies once they’re mainstream.
The reason marketers aren’t taking risks, like testing new technologies, Gaffney said, is the high penalty of failure. “That’s something marketers have to embrace at a high level: making sure it’s OK to take risks and experience failure and learn from it,” Gaffney told Marketing.
Making matter worse, she said, is if marketers wait for technology to go mainstream, they’ll be behind their competitors who will already know how to best use it, when they decide to adopt.
By The Numbers – More from Digital Roadblock
• Marketers that spend a quarter or more of their budget on digital media were more likely to believe they need to reinvent themselves (82%) than those who spend less than one in 10 ad dollars (67%)
• 76% of marketers said they need to be more data-focused to succeed, but 49% said they trust their gut in making marketing decisions
• 69% said they need to personalize their marketing, but just 39% were currently using consumer data and behaviour patterns to influence their marketing strategy
• 61% saw social as the most critical area of focus, followed by mobile (51%), print (9%) and TV (7%)
What do you think of this study’s findings? How much have you seen the CMO role change in your career? Have your say in our comments section below.
