In a data-driven world increasingly powered by AI, companies have unprecedented access to customer data, allowing greater personalisation and insight into customers behaviour. Customers are demanding companies use their data to provide a better service, while wanting companies to protect their data and be privacy conscious.

Personalisation and privacy can be a real opportunity for differentiation. Companies have the opportunity to take a customer-led position to privacy, not just compliance process. Being pro-active about changes and letting customers access and manage their data. Creating greater visibility and trust.

Customer value can be realised by having transparent collection practices, clear privacy policies and providing customers with control of their data. AsAI beings to power more data collection, it is critical that all data collection sources are documented and compliant. Customers will share their information, in fact according to McKinsey 71% of customers expect companies to deliver personalised interactions. With increasing privacy compliance measures, there is the risk that companies will lessen the use of customer data, and decrease the application of personalisation.

Companies who prioritise customer trust and privacy, offering transparency and control over data whilst providing real value, will ultimately be more successful in a privacy-alert world.

Personalisation can reduce customer acquisition, lift revenues and increase marketing spend ROI. Hence the journey to further personalisation should be symbiotic with privacy compliance, to unlock performance and create a growth momentum

Top 5 Checklist for Personation in a privacy-conscious world

• Empower a cross-functional group to manage the customer experience, with the right mix of customer leaders and privacy compliance people. Wirth a edict on transparency, visibility and trust.
• As part of the team, establish process that can quickly react to any changes to privacy legislation or marketplace impacts. As part of the process, formalise implementation across all customer-facing channels.
• Use dynamic customer journey mapping to understand touchpoints, breakpoints and ‘dead-ends’ Unlock customer behaviour to enhance personalisation and instil privacy requirements.
• Use a customer feedback mechanism (customer listening process) that captures real-time customer feedback and implements changes as required. Focusing on customer advocacy and business growth.
• Use of a customer presence centre (CPC) that provides data freedom for customers, where they have access to all aspects of their data and can influence what content, channel, data and timing they want. Provide visibility, availability and processes that continue to promote the ability for customers to be in control of their data.

Companies can take a customer-first strategy into the privacy requirements, enhancing personalisation efforts. By taking this customer-first position, companies can lead and enhance their customer relationships by collecting permission-based data that is centred on trust and customer benefit.

Over the past three decades, the marketing function has evolved organically, often without experienced oversight to define its responsibilities and accountabilities. This evolution has seen marketing departments lurch from one new activity to another—digital, social media, customer experience (CX), artificial intelligence (AI), and more—resulting in increased headcount but diminishing influence and value. The core role of marketing, which is to drive growth, has been overshadowed by these changes.

The Growth of Customer Experience (CX)

Today, Marketing Leaders are deemed responsible for every aspect of CX, spanning technology, data, analytics, and account growth, often without full accountability. This broad scope has led to cross-functional inefficiencies that constrain profit and digital-enabled growth. According to McKinsey, companies that excel in CX can achieve revenue growth rates 4-8% above their market average¹. However, the lack of clear accountability and the complexity of managing CX across multiple functions often hinder these potential gains.

The Strategy-Execution Gap

Growth remains a marketing priority, but the tools and control necessary to achieve it are often outside the marketing department’s purview. This leads to a significant gap between strategy and execution. A Harvard Business Review study found that two-thirds of executives believe their organisations struggle to bridge this gap². This disconnect contributes to the high turnover rate among senior marketing executives, which LinkedIn reports as the highest of any job function at 17%³. The inability to meet growth KPIs is a primary reason for this turnover.

The Knowledge Gap

Marketers need to be absolute experts on consumer behaviours and trends and hyper-aware of the competitive landscape. The relentless, ever-changing media and communication landscape adds to this challenge. Despite having access to advanced analytics and insights, marketers often lack the bandwidth or skill set to fully understand the holistic world their customers live in. A McKinsey report highlights that only 42.1% of organisations use marketing analytics effectively for decision-making⁴.

The Need for Dynamic and Adaptable Strategy

Producing a visionary strategy today requires it to be both dynamic and adaptable. Without responsibility and control over execution, marketers lack the ability to follow through and achieve business goals. This issue is compounded by the fact that many marketing leaders define their roles and teams too narrowly or too broadly. A narrow focus leads to over-reliance on costly third-party agencies, while a broad focus results in significant overlap, multiple handling, and increased costs.

Scope and Team Dynamics

Marketing leaders often define their roles and teams in ways that create immediate biases. A too-narrow role relies heavily on third-party agencies motivated by output rather than successful strategy implementation. Conversely, a too-broad role leads to significant overlap, multiple handling, and increased costs. Marketing teams are currently not empowered to correct cross-functional inefficiencies, causing collaboration mismatches, missed opportunities, and cost blowouts.

What to Do Next

The current construct of marketing departments is not working and is getting worse. Here are some critical next steps to address these challenges:

1. Evaluate Organisational Maturity: Shift from a seller-centric to a customer-growth orientation.
2. Critically Evaluate the Marketing Team: Match the team to global best practice organizational design and evaluate disruptive technologies, including AI, to determine tasks and roles.
3. Reorganise Support Organisations: Align creative, media, and strategy teams, and base remuneration on achievement, not just output.
4. Recast Marketing Value: Empower marketing to run growth programs and foster cross-functional collaboration.
5. Empower Marketing with a Strategic Growth Plan: Ensure the plan is dynamic and adaptable to rapid shifts in culture and customer behaviour.

By addressing these issues and implementing these steps, marketing departments can reclaim their role as growth drivers and adapt to the rapidly changing business environment.

Supporting Data and Statistics

• Perception of Marketing: 55% of leaders believe marketing has an inflated view of its importance⁵.
• Collaboration Drag: 66% of leaders report high ‘collaboration drag’ across major projects⁵.
• CEO Expectations: 75% of CEOs look to CMOs for their business growth strategy⁵.
• Impact of AI: AI is expected to significantly impact marketing, providing a pivotal moment to adjust and create a marketing team that delivers growth⁶.

Would you like to explore more about any specific aspect of this transformation?

The team at f(v) advisory have been monitoring the trends across the globe and validated with several customers in Australia and New Zealand. No surprise that AI has been raised consistently over the last 8 months, but what is a surprise is attaching AI to opportunities. In the following expression of the key trends, we have taken a few on AI can be applied.

A deep dive into the 5 big trends:

Customer-first: Customers are seeking responsiveness, transparency and frictionless experiences. But are reporting that their experiences are much lower than their expectation. Companies who invest in a true omni-channel experience can start to put the customer first and see positive lifts in loyalty and growth. AI can play a major part here. As customers can use up to 6 different channels to ability to analyse the interactions and activity across channels combined with market and environmental data can create a frictionless, positive connection.

Personalisation: Creating an audience of 1 is one of the key drivers of growth with companies driving 40% more revenue from personalisation that slower moving companies. Investing in personalisation drives lifetime value leading to better revenue, retention and loyalty. AI can enhance data collection and insights, enabling companies to build personalised, one-to-one relationships across multiple channels. Customers are happier to share their data if they know it will enhance their experience. Customers want to be treated harmoniously across all channels and quality businesses use customer data as the ‘lifeblood’ of a best-in-class personalised experience across online, app, social and store.

Loyalty Re-imagined: Loyalty programs can increase customer lifetime value but have been seen by customers to be ‘generic’ with no differentiation. A loyalty program done well can increase customer advocacy by 70% and 60% of customers on a well-run loyalty program are likely to spend more. The opportunity for companies is to expand beyond just offering discounts and spending rewards.   Include rewards for relationship building activities such as user-generated-content (UGC), community activity, FAQ content or rating and reviews. AI can enhance how the data, behaviour and activity is presented and delivered in real-time to your loyal customers.

Product Availability: Product and service availability is a significant pain point for customers. Customers are looking for real-time information on inventory status including stock quantities, out-of-stock information, flexible fulfillment options and delivery status. Customers claim, ‘fast delivery’ and ‘low shipping costs’ as the 2 most important aspects of a positive delivery experience. But the most important factor is that customers have visibility in being able to know when to expect a delivery. 85% of consumers will not shop with a retailer again after having a poor delivery experience. Using AI to gather real-time information on all aspects of inventory management can deliver a quality experience for customer’s number one CX expectation.

Trust: Companies need to ensure that their gathering and delivery of customer data is aligned to dynamic government data protection legislation. It is critical that customers have full visibility to their data and collection methods and can influence on how their data is collected. Use of AI is becoming increasing important for companies to present how it is being used and presenting to customers the complete dta sources and their compliance to legislation. Companies can use the ways the handle customer data and privacy as a source of competitive advantage. Customers will spend more with companies who protect their privacy and provide co=more control of their data. Quality companies provide customers with the ability to edit, delete and withdraw their consent, by individual channel, content and timing.

A Big 5 Trend Checklist

1. To be customer-first, ensure you have a quality embedded real-time listening and response process for customer input, across multiple channels
2. Use AI to create a Personalised experience that creates the concept of a ‘audience of 1’
3. Reward all elements of the customer relationship to provide a ‘stickier’ loyalty program.
4. Create a point-of-difference by providing a AI enabled real-time view of all aspects of inventory management, in particular order status and delivery timing.
5. Use an easy to find and use customer preference centre (CPC) that allows customers to have data freedom. Providing control, protection and privacy, by channel, content and timing.

Customer experience is everything an organisation does for, and to their customers, and how it makes them feel…: