The recent standing of the Contract Manufacturing Organization (CMO) industry insights advocates highlighting the remit of marketing leaders as well as focus on tech priorities, skill development, and procurement. Currently, around two-thirds of Australian marketers own their organisation’s customer experience function, and approximately one-third of them possess unique purchasing power for customer technologies.
The second annual State of the CMO report reveals 62 per cent of marketing leaders engaging in the yearly survey hold customer experience reporting into marketing, around 53 per cent have taken this responsibility in the last year. 86 per cent of marketing leaders possess own digital commerce and strategy, and approximately 30 per cent owns have customer service/care as a functional reporting line.
According to the marketing leaders, in the coming year, the most sought-after technology investment priorities would be marketing automation, digital platforms and customer management platforms. The investment plan in artificial intelligence (AI) would also be a top priority. 12 per cent of the organisations in the participating group are currently using AI in customer-facing or back-end applications actively. Another 23 per cent are now testing their AI solutions. However, 41 per cent of the organisations revealed currently they do not have any plans of incorporating AI into their system. This fact divulged significant questions around the level of industry know-how based on AI applications among the organisations in the marketing realm.
The State of the CMO, 2018 report also considered areas of skills development and domains where the industry is currently facing skills gaps. As expected, the marketers still have scopes of improvement in the areas concerning data analytics and science. 82 per cent of the marketers think of it as a significant skills issue in 2018.
However, the marketers expressed a level of optimism in their capabilities. This was encouraging news in State of the CMO, 2018. Most of the marketers valued them four out of five in the majority of the areas from innovation to commercial domain. Nevertheless, times are tough. 52 per cent of the marketers experienced increased board and CEO pressure in the last year. So, overall, the State of the CMO, 2018 was a mixed bag for the marketers.