Marketing's 2008 Priorities
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The top priorities for marketing executives have a way of turning into the top priorities for CIOs, and the work IT organizations do on business intelligence. The Marketing Executives Networking Group has released its list of top marketing trends for 2008, based on a survey of its 1700 members conducted by Anderson Analytics. Here's what's on their members' minds, according to a brief report published by the firm: |
Marketing basics (60% "Very Important"), which include specific concepts such as customer satisfaction, customer retention, segmentation, brand loyalty and ROI were of greatest interest. Interestingly, Search Engine Optimization (42%) had relatively wide appeal and cut across marketers in all fields. "Green Marketing" (32%) was another important emerging concept and it was identified as the trendiest marketing buzzword.China is viewed as the region with the best future opportunity (52%); India is a distant second (20%). Few marketers saw other regions such as Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Latin America, Brazil, Russia, and Mexico, as comparable opportunities.
When asked about the most important customer demographics senior marketing executives rank Baby Boomers highest with 88% ranking them as either very important or somewhat important. What may be surprising is the fact that Gen X (86%), Hispanics (86%), Women (85%) and Gen Y (84%) are catching up to Boomers as customer targets.
The results of this study are consistent with the data we'll present later this month in CIO Insight's new Customer Strategies survey, coming out later this month.
Finally, marketing executives and CIOs are reading and impressed by many of the same books, which provides common ground for conversations. (CIO Insight has also interviewed many of these works' authors; follow the links below to read those articles.)
"Good to Great," "The World is Flat" and "Blink" were the top three most recently read books by senior-level marketing executives to stay abreast of information and gain insights for their business. In terms of all-time favorite business book ever read, topping the list were "Good to Great," "Positioning" and "7 Habits of Highly Effective People."
