Retail Marketing - Shopping Center Marketing

Imagine you’re in a meeting with your CFO and he/she announces that all variable spending must be held flat or increased at a significantly slower rate than you have experienced over the last two years. Now what do you do? While we haven’t been privy to your budget meetings, we do get the subsequent calls to help defend the value of marketing efforts and prioritize how they should focus going forward. The good news is that despite the economy, the majority of calls we’re currently getting don’t find marketers in a flat or reduced spending situation, but rather in one that will slow in anticipation of lower topline growth. Here are five core trends that will help you be more selective in where you place your bets in 2009.

One: The Next Level of Measurement
Now more than ever, marketers will be asked to defend their budget, demonstrate the value of their impact to sales and describe their unique value proposition to the business. Our research has found that only 15% of b-to-b marketing functions use an automated marketing dashboard; another 62% are currently developing such a dashboard. While there are no shortcuts to properly deploying a marketing dashboard, we believe that the greatest area of focus for 2009 will center on metrics that align with sales, particularly around the demand waterfall.

Two: Leveraging Global Marketing
With tight budgets to accomplish all that the business requires from marketing, coupled with a need for highly integrated campaigns to deliver complex messages and uneven deployment of proven marketing best practices, there is an understandable outcry to build a more effective global marketing function. While each region, country and business unit likely has unique requirements, there always will be a foundation of marketing assets, processes and tools that the entire community in your business can leverage.

Three: Don’t Forget the Customer
When markets are tenuous and confusing, clear market and customer research is needed to determine the marketing activities that will drive success. Market intelligence functions give an organization the independent “facts” to objectively determine their best courses of action, but unfortunately are one of the first on the chopping block when budgets need to be adjusted. Best-practice organizations maintain their focus on customer research as a priority, no matter what the economy is doing.

Four: Rethinking Marketing Skills
The role of marketing has become more complex over the last five years; it now requires greater technology acumen, more disciplined targeting, and the ability to provide highly integrated content that matches the buying processes to prospects and customers. As a result, marketing managers are becoming increasingly challenged to be able to develop and execute all of the activities under their purview. To address this, best-practice organizations are pursuing three strategies to augment and develop their skills, including:
1. Creating a shared services group
2. Changing hiring criteria
3. Investing in marketing training

Five: Embracing “Product to Portfolio” Marketing
The drive to be more “solutions-based” continues to push marketing to talk less about products and more about the key issues facing their customers and prospects; a simple check of the navigation of most Websites now uncovers multiple links for products, solutions, industries and buying centers. This complexity has pushed product marketing toward the “portfolio” approach of packaging, or the organization of marketing efforts and sales tools based on customer and prospect buying cycle dynamics.

If I was to boil down to one word my recommendations to marketing executives for the coming year, it would be “progress.” Don’t try and boil the ocean; rather, pick your battles carefully and focus on those where you are most likely to make significant progress.

[Story Found at Canadian Marketing Blog]