When compared with the global average of 60 per cent, this makes Asia's CMOs a pretty confident bunch.
The 2012 CMO Insights Survey is based on 405 surveys across 10 countries with senior marketing executives conducted between August and September last year. All respondents are from companies with at least US$1 billion in annual revenues, with companies in France, Australia, Singapore and Brazil all having an annual revenue of at least $500 million. In Asia-Pacific the markets surveyed were Singapore, Australia and China.
Asia's CMOs are also nearly as keen as the global average to allocate a quarter of their budget to digital—41 per cent versus the global figure of 47 per cent. Furthermore, 44 per cent believe their marketing budget will grow significantly, an increase of nine points from 2011.
A prior study by Adobe however points out that while Asia-Pacific’s marketers are interested in digital, most are simply not prepared for it due to a lack of digital talent and organisational alignment.
Randstad too has observed, anecdotally, that marketers in Asia are struggling to hire the digital talent they need.
This budget will be spent with external parties as the study also found that CMOs in Asia-Pacific rely heavily on external parties to support the explosion of channels. Between 41 per cent and 76 per cent of the region’s marketing activities are managed by external agencies creating an extremely fragmented environment.
But overall, CMOs in the region are satisfied with their agencies, claims Accenture’s study. When it comes to managing the marketing budget, CMOs in APAC are more satisfied (23 per cent higher than the global average) with the performance of partner agencies in managing marketing budget. They also have much higher levels of satisfaction with agencies’ abilities to provide an integrated view of marketing effectiveness and business processes around briefs and decision making.
This contrasts with an earlier study by WFA which found that marketers in Asia-Pacific believe media rebates to be particularly high in China, Indonesia, the Philippines and India, implying a lack of trust in their agencies.
"Organisations operating in Asia Pacific tend to have a more aggressive growth agenda compared to their western peers. As a result, they also have a greater level of willingness and appetite to adopt digital technologies," Marco Ryan, managing director for ASEAN at Accenture Interactive told Campaign Asia-Pacific explaining the firm's survey results. "Whilst the Asia Pacific study revealed some positive findings, CMOs in the region do grapple with challenges and face an increasingly complex marketing environment."
Accenture too seems sceptical about the preparedness of Asia’s CMOs with its study implying that CMOs need to work towards being more internally self-sufficient. The survey found that despite their confidence, Asia’s CMOs are struggling with a lack of critical technology, inefficient business practices as well as the lack of integration with other business functions.
“It is not a surprise that CMOs are facing challenges in the digital space. There is a clear performance gap between the demands of the marketplace and the ability of marketing organisations to apply the digital technology talent required to be more effective,” said Ryan.
CMOs, recommends Accenture, should hire, reskill and redeploy people to “improve efficiency, agility and responsiveness and enable them to stay relevant and engage with customers through the most convenient channel and with the most relevant offer”.
“The growing investment in digital capabilities will help marketing executives improve their understanding of changing consumer needs and manage multiple channels,” said Ryan. “However, improved performance will require more than new digital and analytics talent. The challenges of digital transformation is how to implement beyond marketing and across the entire enterprise.”
UPDATE, 15 May: Accenture issued a correction on the percentage of Asian CMOs allocating a quarter of their budgets to digital. The figure is 41 per cent, not 62 per cent. The article has been updated to reflect this change.
