Christine Moorman is the Director of The CMO Survey and the T. Austin Finch, Sr. Professor of Business Administration, The Fuqua School of Business, Duke University.

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Spending on Marketing Analytics

March 28th, 2012

I added a special section focusing on marketing analytics to the February 2012 issue of The CMO Survey. With all the talk about “big data” and the billions of dollars companies appear to pouring into capturing, processing, and leverage customer data, I thought it would be a good idea to examine where companies are on a few key issues and also where they expect to be over time on this strategic investment.

I asked top marketers to report what percentage of their marketing budgets they spend on marketing analytics. I think this is a reasonable request given that 70% of all top marketers state that the marketing analytics group reports to them. Results indicate that companies currently spend an average of 5.7% of their marketing budgets on marketing analytics and that this number is expected to grow to 9.1% in the next three years. This 60% increase represents a sizable shift. To put it in perspective, marketing budgets overall have grown 8.3% over the last two years. This growth varies by company size and industry sector. Looking at Table 1, we can see that, in general, current marketing analytic spending levels and expected growth levels correlate with company size (measured as revenues). There is a trough near the middle for companies between $500M-$999M, but otherwise the relationship is positive and significant. Examining sector differences in Table 2, we see that services companies, overall, spend more on marketing analytics now and will remain ahead of product companies in the next three years. From these figures, service companies appear to understand the “big data” opportunity and believe they can leverage it to create more value for their customers.
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CMOs on Economic Recovery: A Look at the Long Climb Out

March 20th, 2012

While going through my students’ resumes before class, I read one that listed “stair climbing” as a competitive sport. I had never heard of this, so I looked it up and found a well-established world-wide network of races. You can, for example, climb the Empire State Building and Gran Hotel Bali. Doing well requires strength, sprint, and endurance. If you are really good and perform well in the 100+ races around the world, you could win the Towerrunning World Cup.

All this talk of climbing made me think it would be interesting to plot the economic recovery using data from The CMO Survey. I plotted several key financial metrics as reported by The CMO Survey between August 2009 and February 2012 in Figure 1. What a beautiful sight! Steady and significant improvement over the course of 2.5 years to where we are today. These numbers are in response to the question, “Rate your firm’s performance during the last 12 months.”
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The Social Media Integration Gap

March 13th, 2012

Last week I reported on the expected increase in social media spend from an already high 7.4% of marketing budgets to 10.4% within a year and 19.5% within five years. It is therefore both interesting and somewhat disturbing that we continue to see a sizable fissure between what companies are doing with social media and what they are doing with the rest of their strategies. I asked CMOs to rate “How effectively is social media integrated with your firm’s marketing strategy” on a seven point scale where 7 is “very integrated” and 1 is “not at all integrated.” Results from The CMO Survey indicate an average score of 3.8 with a standard deviation of 2.0. Sadly, only 7 percent of respondents believe that social media is “very integrated” to the firm’s strategy while 18.4% rated social media as “not at all integrated.” The full distribution of responses is shown in Figure 1.
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Social Media Spend Continues to Soar

March 6th, 2012

Results from The CMO Survey, February 2012 indicate that marketers continue to increase spend on social media. In the next 5 years, marketers expect to spend 19.5% of their budgets on social media, almost three times more than the current level! Within a year, marketers expect to spend 10.8% of their budgets on social media. These figures deserve a deeper investigation into what has been happening over time. First, social media spend, as a percent of marketing budgets has continued to increase over the last 2.5 years I have been measuring these levels in The CMO Survey. From the initial level of 3.5% in August 2009, we have witnessed an 111% increase to the current levels at 7.4% (see Figure 1).
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Top Marketers See U.S. Economy on the Rebound

February 28th, 2012

The results from The CMO Survey are in and one fact is very clear:  Chief Marketing Officers are overwhelmingly optimistic about the U.S. economy’s outlook. When asked if they were more or less optimistic about the overall U.S. economy compared to last quarter, optimists outweighed pessimists 8 to 1. (more…)

Investing in Marketing Knowledge

February 21st, 2012

The CMO Survey tracks investments companies make in different kinds of marketing knowledge.  In the August 2011 survey, companies reported the following average investments: marketing training (+3.1%), marketing consulting (+3.5%), integrating what we know about marketing (+6.0%), market research and intelligence (+6.2%), and developing knowledge about how to do marketing (+6.4%).  (more…)

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A Fast Boat to China: Notes on Marketing

February 7th, 2012

The CMO Survey reported that China will be the focus of the most dramatic increases in U.S. company sales revenues in international markets during the next 12 months. When asked to list the top three international markets for sales growth, approximately 20% named China. (more…)

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Who Outsources Marketing?

January 31st, 2012

There are good reasons to outsource marketing and many companies choose to do so. Let’s look at more CMO Survey results to get a sense of what types of firms are outsourcing marketing and what financial and strategic conditions appear to give rise to outsourcing. (more…)

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Outsourcing Marketing

January 24th, 2012

I asked top marketers to report how much they expected their companies to outsource marketing in the next 12 months. This percentage has grown over time as shown in Figure 1. In fact the last measurement, taken in August 2011, grew by over 100% over the prior year! (more…)

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Holding on to Marketing Leaders

January 17th, 2012

When times get tough, do marketing leaders get fired? Three years of results from The CMO Survey indicate the answer is “No.” Looking at Figure 1, we can see that the number of years a top marketer is in his or her current role in a company averages 4.4 years and that this number has not changed dramatically over the last three years: 2009 (4.3 years), 2010 (4.6 years), and 2011 (4.3 years). (more…)

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