The CMO Council’s Marketing Vitality Index shows CMOs under pressure to grow revenue, meet rising customer expectations, create operational efficiencies, improve campaign performance, rein in costs, and address challenges in MarTech. The good news is the expansive CMO remit underscores marketing’s rising influence on the enterprise.
The Marketing Vitality Index is a new annual assessment of forces and factors impacting functional performance and includes forecasts, facts and figures going into 2025 and beyond. This year’s assessment evidences a defining, milestone year ahead. Most notably:
- Gen AI and data utilization technologies will enable significant marketing momentum and customer engagement moments to be tracked, attributed and measured for business value.
- Iterative strategic, creative and operational decisions will be data driven. These will be enriched by generative research and real-time market feedback from pervasive social media and search engine sensing.
- A unified and fully aligned marketing supply chain will become adaptive and responsive to customer purchasing influences and chat commerce opportunities across every channel and touch point.
- Migration to digital channels and automated marketing platforms will multiply exponentially for both brand equity and performance marketing reasons and results.
- A massive, mobile, user-connected world — where billions of buyers share breadcrumbs of personal intelligence and purchase intent daily – is creating new levels of branded content innovation and interaction worldwide.
- The Creator Economy has achieved critical mass and significance with savvy marketers seeking to crowdsource cross-cultural and localized inspiration, content invention and outsourced efficiencies from consumers and professionals alike.
- Brand protection imperatives will team CMOs and functional leaders to assure brand value, trust, integrity and reputation; this will center on new strategies, tools and methods to mitigate and recover from costly brand hijacking, impersonation, product counterfeiting, and customer data breaches.
- Trade and tariff headwinds, along with geopolitical face-offs and regulatory changes, will force CMOs and C-suite peers into contingent planning mode to synchronize supply and demand chains and adapt to shifting country-of-origin perceptions.
- Revenue science platforms will gain traction and lift as chief growth officers examine all areas of monetization, retention, conversion, expansion, extension, and yield/price optimization.
- Marketing investments and outcomes will be more productive, predictive, accountable and measurable with spending more surgical and certain to deliver ROI.
Marketing Vitality Index tracks the dynamic state of marketing using critical business, economic, market, customer, operational, employment, training, outsourcing, channel, budgetary, media spend and technology investment indicators. These indicators fall into five core marketing categories:
- Marketing Mix + Spend
- Organizational Dynamics
- Market Outlook + Trends
- Customer Affinity + Attachment
- Technology Adoption + Execution
The Marketing Vitality Index found that revenue science must be the guiding light for marketing. CMOs should allocate spending to mostly digital channels that engage target customers more actively, more visibly, and can be measured and optimized.
Revenue science doesn’t just offer insights into the effectiveness of digital channels. CMOs might be guided toward spending more on cooperative marketing, localization, channel partners, etc. Revenue science keeps marketing’s eye on results in a shifting media landscape.
Smarter marketing is also being driven by increased competition and audience fragmentation. Audiences are spread out in a plethora of social media channels that rise and fall in popularity. Influencer marketing, chat commerce, buyer intent signals are all important tools for modern marketers to succeed in the world of digital shopping, e-commerce and home delivery.
Campaign differentiation will continue to be difficult. Some 37 percent of CMOs said their campaign performance needs improvement, reveals research by the CMO Council. Growing revenue through campaigns and hyper-personalized engagement that converts intention-based buyers into loyal, high-value customers is as challenging as it sounds.
Getting more value out of MarTech is another ongoing challenge. Automation and GenAI promise to drive efficiency and effectiveness in the marketing workforce, but it won’t be easy. CMOs will have to chart a sensible path through AI’s turbulent waters.
The CMO Council has curated indicator statistics from trusted third-party sources and centers of domain knowledge and proprietary data from its qualitative and quantitative reports to inform the Marketing Vitality Index. The CMO Council represents more than 16,000 marketing leaders in 10,000 companies collectively controlling nearly $1 trillion in annual, aggregated marketing spend.
The author, Tom Kaneshige, is Chief Content Officer at CMO Council.