The road to making marketing accountable has been perilously slow. In the time of David Ogilvy marketers believed in measurement, their status was high. But many years ago, marketing turned inward and focused on ads. The CMO stopped being a business partner to the CEO. Marketing got dumbed down to being seen as frivolous, a cost center not an investment.
AB InBev is the owner of over 500 drinks brands including national beers (Budweiser, Stella Artois, Corona Extra) canned cocktails, craft beers, energy drinks, etc.. In an interview for The Wall Street Journal’s C-Suite Strategies section, the CMO of AB InBev discussed the changes in the Group’s brand marketing. One significant change is the focus on occasion-based segmentation.
One of the more important strategic choices for a business is how it will organize itself and go about delivering value to its customers. Few firms have the capacity to be fully integrated and take responsibility for creating and delivering the entire product or service they sell. Even if a firm could do so, complete integration is rarely an optimal financial strategy.
Marketers are swimming in data. The amount of data available to marketers is exploding and the analysis of very large data sets, popularly referred to as “big data,” has been touted as the next wave of productive marketing practice. Such data range from records of transactions to the text of reviews and customer service interactions, to images and video. The availability of such data should make brand building easier.
Brands are defined as much by their market and competitors as their own unique characteristics. Just consider what happened recently to the airline industry where the problems of a single carrier shaded the whole industry. This means building and maintaining a brand must include paying attention to the market as a whole.
