Marketers feel the strain as workload goes through roof

Brand owners are piling ever more responsibility onto their marketing chiefs, with remits being expanded to cover areas including design, R&D, product innovation, generative AI – and in some cases pricing and distribution – and beyond, sparking fears that many CMOs simply do not have the resources to cope.

So says a new study by McKinsey & Co, which explores the strategic, technological, operational, and performance-related gaps that consumer CMOs need to address to future-proof their companies’ growth.

“Connecting for growth: A makeover for your marketing operating model,” claims these new responsibilities are in response to fragmented consumer attention and slowing population growth, but warns the move may fortify organisational silos and layered decision-making and impede agility.

In fact, only just over a quarter (27%) of CMOs believe their operating models are sufficiently mature to meet these new challenges.

CMOs say traditional marketing functions like content and creative (83%), consumer insights (78%), and communications (64%) are now “table stakes”, but that more commercial elements are being added in, including shopper insights (63%), promotions (61%), design (46%), sales/ecommerce (34%), product innovation (24%), pricing (35%), and generative AI (22%).

Brand-building and full-funnel marketing top the chart for strategic imperatives, but there is a distinct gap in operational maturity for key marketing growth areas.

Some 87% of CMOs believe that brand-building is “strategically important”, but only 58% rate their companies as “mature” in this respect. There are similarly significant gaps for deploying full-funnel marketing strategy (78% – 39%), KPI clarity (75% – 43%), strategic budgeting (72% – 47%), and defining a creative strategy (71% – 31%).

In addition, a similar proportion (83%) of CMOs say “measuring marketing performance” is important. However, only 41% say their companies are “mature” in this ability.

There are similar gaps in perceived importance versus proficiency for dynamic spend adjustment (82% – 30%) and delivering personalised targeting (71% – 23%).

Meanwhile, three quarters of marketers see the estimated $463bn generative AI marketing productivity as an opportunity, but only 9% have evaluated Gen AI-enabled automation opportunities, just 5% are building Gen AI capabilities, and a mere 4% are scaling up Gen AI use cases.

Top use cases include creative efficiency (39%), personalisation at scale (28%), media optimisation (28%), and automating the business of marketing (22%), including non-creative tasks such as drafting internal marketing assets, web search scans for initial insights, and initial ideation.

Some 20% are also testing use cases for customer experience improvement, including offering interactive discovery and response experiences for customers through search or chat.

Even so, the marketing operating model is deemed foundational to building distinctive capabilities and driving growth. Leading strengths include a clear link between marketing activities and business outcomes (42%), clearly articulated marketing strategy (39%), sufficient budget (35%), and distinctive talent/capabilities in priority marketing functions (32%).

However, marketing leaders face a wide range of challenges when it comes to advancing their operating models.

The biggest challenges for those who work in companies with less mature operating models are related to a siloed structure and a lack of cross-functional collaboration (36%), insufficient budget to support desired marketing activities (34%), insufficient talent/capabilities in-house (32%), incoherent strategy (32%), and insufficient budget to support resourcing requirements (28%).

McKinsey’s growth, marketing and sales practice partner Biljana Cvetanovski said: “The CMO’s role is continuing to evolve. It has now expanded to encompass design, innovation, pricing, sales, e-commerce and generative AI – all in the service of sustainable and profitable growth.

“While CMOs understand growth drivers, there are gaps in some of these new critical capabilities. To succeed, marketing leaders need to focus in on how to connect for growth: connecting their teams with the right structure, connecting ways of working through governance and culture, and connecting their expertise to specific strategic growth drivers.

“Only by leveraging advanced technologies and investing in these areas, can brands turn their strategic vision into tangible results.”