With more than 90 major U.S. retailers closing their doors in late March to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, both government and business are trying to mitigate the pandemic’s disruptive economic impact.
Now a global network of senior corporate marketing leaders and brand decision-makers, the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council, is reducing the cost of using its online decision support center and research library by $400 to give struggling companies and small businesses unlimited access to valuable peer-based knowledge and insights for just $95 a year.
The CMO Council community includes some 16,000 senior marketers in 10,000 companies of all sizes across more than 110 countries. Collectively, CMO Council members control nearly $1 trillion in annual, aggregated marketing spend. The Council has published hundreds of research reports, white papers, strategic briefs and maintains a Marketing Intelligence center that curates extensive content used for marketing planning, competitive tracking and budget allocation. It also has a private social network and LinkedIn group for live peer interaction.
“Given the severity and abnormality of the global pandemic we are significantly discounting access to our knowledge center and now opening this up to non-members, irrespective of whether they are client-side strategic marketers, agencies, distribution partners, media channels, vendors, economists, Wall Street analysts or public sector officials,” notes Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the 15-year-old CMO Council based in Silicon Valley.
“Marketers have been side-swiped by this sudden crisis and are reaching out for best and next response ideas, customer engagement solutions, and guidance from others who have ridden the storm of previous market upheavals,” notes Neale-May. He points to findings from research just fielded by the CMO Council which show:
- 84% of global marketers expect the pandemic will multiply business disruption globally
- 90% expect to make changes to their marketing plans
- 66% said they don’t have enough real-time visibility and insight into the pandemic’s impact across both the demand and supply chains
- 69% are not satisfied with the quality, timeliness and usefulness of decision support data
Access to CMO Council thought leadership content will help companies evolve the annual marketing planning process into a sustained, on-demand exercise to improve business agility and responsiveness to competitive challenges, and market dynamics. A free CMO Council content catalogue is available for downloading here and activation of the $95 premium content subscription can be done here using discount code SPRING2020. CMO Council members that subscribe will automatically be upgraded to Premium Membership.
With more than $1.5 trillion spent on marketing and communications worldwide, there are significant incentives for global enterprises to improve the way they allocate, optimize and justify spend. Functional marketing silos are being imploded and tightly connected for improved collaboration, integration, workflow and use of critical data using advanced marketing automation platforms.
Determining the optimal way to go to market has never been more challenging. A multitude of new digital media channels, social networks and online/mobile avenues of market access are fragmenting media buys. Today’s marketing planning process requires better data integration and analytics, more accurate forecasting and predictive modeling, higher levels of marketing group participation and accountability, as well as the deployment of closed loop campaign performance dashboards.
Source: CMO Council
