The
Marketing Executive
Roundtable
A Sampling of Recent
Roundtable Discussions
are always substantive and geared to the concerns of top-level marketing leaders. The group is polled regularly for topics of interest, and each discussion is facilitated by a different member. This helps us to tap into the rich tapestry of expertise and experience represented in the group, and fosters more penetrating dialog. Each session begins with a brief presentation on the topic, with the rest of the session devoted to in-depth discussion.
Following is a sample of discussion topics from recent Roundtable sessions. The topics vary from meeting to meeting, but
May, 2019
Driving Customer Satisfaction: Marketing in the Customer Experience Age
Ninety-percent of organizations said they view their CMOs as the connective tissue between different lines of the organization. It stands to reason, then, that chief marketers are in the pole position to champion the importance of a holistic, end-to-end customer experience company-wide. While many Marketers have had a customer centric mindset for years, there’s mounting pressure to implement a CX strategy that will satisfy many stakeholders and ultimately result in increased loyalty and growth / profitability.
In this in-depth discussion, members compared their business models with regard to CX and covered related topics such as the role of other internal functions, the optimal structure for a superior CX operation, the most critical or useful technologies, methods & practices, and the best metrics to gauge progress and success.
March, 2019
Marketing Your Strategy Internally: The Importance and Role of Internal Communications
Your employees are often the face of your brand, and can make or break the experience your customer has with your company. Ensuring that they not only understand your strategy but also feel a connection and ownership of it enables you to enlist the full power of your workforce, committed to creating a customer experience that aligns with your strategy.
In early 2018, Microsoft launched a strategy to more closely connect its Customer Service and Support team with the company's mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Our member from Microsoft shared the details behind the campaign to bring that strategy to life internally, and the impact it produced on customer and employee satisfaction. We then discussed and compared this to approaches being employed in other MER member companies.
December, 2018
Jump the Marketing/C-Suite Chasm: Get Known for Your Amazing Work
You’re doing great work, innovating marketing “firsts” for your organization that make a difference with clients and inspire your team. The problem is no one inside knows it. You aren’t getting the attention of your internal influencers or the C-suite.
It’s really about how we package and tell our story – and knowing the audience we’re telling it to. Combining marketing better practices with lessons learned from the newspaper, technology and restaurant industries, this discussion focused on how our weekly, monthly, quarterly, and year-end communications either strengthen our role as an essential resource or bore people into an eye-rolling stupor. The members shared examples of what's worked at their businesses for getting marketing's work noticed, and brainstormed how to improve tactics.
November, 2018
Branding in the Age of Cat Videos
It’s not just cat videos. Millennials and Gen Z are increasingly moving away from traditional brands to values-based brands. They use the connections and information online to choose products and services that are recommended. They use brand names to refer to and remember what they chose, but they are choosing the products not the brands. Given this turmoil, what makes a successful brand in the 21st century? What does a successful brand designer do in 2018 and beyond to be valuable to clients and produce results? Seattle brand design legend Ted Leonhardt led a stimulating discussion on how these trends are reshaping our approach to brand development and execution.
September, 2018
Breaking Down the Growth Mystique: Exploring Strategic Steps to Company Growth
Most people feel that the primary solution to growth is simply to boost sales volume. But the right solution can be quite different, depending a company’s opportunities and circumstances. In any case, marketing plays, or should play, a pivotal role in mapping growth strategy by assessing market trends, identifying competitive advantages, evaluating the outcomes of past strategies, ideally participating in strategy development, and then designing the marketing program to execute that strategy. From that standpoint, marketing leaders should have a “seat at the table.” This discussion focused on the various steps to orchestrating strategic growth, exploring some of marketing’s many factors relating to growth strategy.