CMOs Are Showing The Strain Of A Tough 2024

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This year has been difficult for many businesses, and a study from Bospar, Redpoint and CMO Huddles shows marketers are taking on a lot of the strain. In a survey of CMOs this spring, 69% said they believed that their industry was in a recession. More than three quarters (77%) reported flat or reduced budgets, and 61% said this has been the most difficult time period in their entire career.

As marketing budgets shrink, performance pressure on CMOs has ratcheted up. In response to economic uncertainty, many companies have also extended their average deal cycles, which is harder on individual marketers. And more than three-quarters of marketers say they’ve been under more pressure to deliver pipeline results this year, with nearly seven in 10 reporting they’ve been asked to do more with less.

It’s not surprising that 67% of CMOs said this last year has negatively impacted their well being, with 70% taking less time off, 40% gaining weight and 15% having mental health issues.

In the report, CMO Huddles’ Drew Neisser acknowledges that it’s an extremely tough time, but encourages CMOs to exhibit leadership and find results where possible. Today’s CMO should embrace technology and analytics, keeping track of metrics to definitively show campaign success—and that can easily show efficacy to skeptical executives. They should concentrate on where an impact can be made, especially if budgets and people are cut. And they should look to generative AI as a way to streamline business processes and make some of the administrative parts of marketing more efficient.

After the Covid-19 pandemic forced many companies to quickly get deep into digital marketing and e-commerce, some have continued that journey into technology to better serve customers. Tapestry—owner of luxury brands Coach, Kate Spade New York and Stuart Weitzman—is blending technology, human knowledge and AI to build a strategy that meets consumers where they are. I talked to Chief Omni and Innovation Officer Noam Paransky about this strategy, and an excerpt from our conversation is later in this newsletter.

We’re taking next week off, and Forbes CMO will not send on August 21. We’ll be back in your inboxes on August 28.

SOCIAL MEDIA

X owner Elon Musk again worked to bring a newsworthy event to his platform this week: The world’s richest man interviewed Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. And once again, there were technical issues. Musk’s interview of Trump started 45 minutes late—hold music was the only thing 765,000 users waiting for the interview could hear 30 minutes after it was scheduled to begin. Many—rival Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign included—said it sounded like the former president was slurring his speech during the 2½-hour conversation. Trump claims it was a technical issue from the equipment, while Musk’s xAI Grok chatbot concluded Trump was having a problem with his dentures. Trump is not known to wear dentures.

Musk has said he wants to make X, formerly known as Twitter, an “everything app,” complete with worthwhile livestreams. But the Trump interview is another example of how that isn’t working out well. Musk claims the interview started late because of a distributed denial-of-service attack, in which the server is so flooded it cannot operate, but tech experts found no evidence of one. Instead, many comparisons have been made to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s May 2023 glitch-filled X event at which he announced his presidential campaign.

The interview itself was not expected to make much news. Musk endorsed Trump last month, and has been contributing to a super PAC that supports his campaign, so it was anticipated to be a non-confrontational conversation. But after more than two hours of the former president talking, it’s telling that what most people are talking about is how the technology didn’t work.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

While many analysts and experts have warned about AI-generated images playing a role in the 2024 election, Elon Musk’s xAI Grok-2 model appears to allow for (relatively) realistic AI images with vast potential to confuse the public. It’s the first image generator made by xAI, but it doesn’t seem to have the same restrictions as AI image generators from companies including OpenAI’s DALL-E and Google’s Gemini. Grok-2 can make images featuring political figures—early images shared on social media include former presidents using drugs, the two current presidential candidates in a boxing ring, and Republican candidate Donald Trump firing a pair of guns. But aside from politicians, Grok-2 can also generate images featuring brands and copyrights. Grok-2 is currently in beta, and is only available to X users with subscriptions to premium access or above.

NOW TRENDING

Secondhand apparel shopping app ThredUp launched several generative AI features designed to make shopping easier and enhance user experience, writes Forbes senior contributor Pam Danziger. The app, which resells high-quality women’s and children’s clothing, shoes and accessories, can now use a photo of an outfit, clothing item or pattern to find similar pieces in its inventory, along with improved search functionality overall. And a chat function allows users to chat about their style and customize the options returned to them. The search enhancements make sense for ThredUp, which adds 40,000 unique items to its store each day. Allowing more opportunities for users to target their search saves time in scrolling through choices, and it takes advantage of the unique array of items ThredUp has in its inventory.

ON MESSAGE

How Tapestry Uses Technology To Meet Customers Where They Are

Noam Paransky was hired as the chief digital officer for Tapestry—parent company of luxury brands Coach, Kate Spade New York and Stuart Weitzman—in April 2019, months before the Covid-19 pandemic upended retail. As the shut-downs and shut-ins began to subside, Paransky’s title was changed to chief omni and innovation officer as a reflection of how consumers now behave: Engaging with brands both online and in person.

I talked with him about how Tapestry is working to connect all of the branding, data and commerce dots with both their customers and their sales associates. This conversation has been edited for length, clarity and continuity. A longer version is available here.

Right now, how do things break down with sales and traffic between digital and in-store?

Ultimately, most of the engagement writ large is happening in digital. A lot of that’s in social channels. A lot of that is not our own content. It’s engaging with influencers or community groups about our brands or the category. The action at volume is happening in digital channels.

Generally in high consideration purchase categories like handbags, the majority of sales are happening in the physical world, but those things are inexorably linked. We find in our research that something like 95%+ of consumers are engaging in both physical and digital. It’s not so much, ‘I’m a digital shopper.’ You might transact digitally, but you’re engaging in the physical world quite a bit with the category, with brands.

As we exited the pandemic, we changed my title and my scope to match how the consumer views the world, which is boundary-less and channel-less. They don’t think, ‘I’m engaging with Coach online.’ They just think, ‘I’m engaging with this brand,’ or ‘I’m dreaming of my next handbag or my next pair of shoes.’ They just don’t see the world in a black-and-white way that we might in some financial report.

Tell me about your AI-powered Tell Rexy system.

It goes back to our awesome sales associates and the expertise that they have. They are engaging with the consumer one-on-one, day in and day out. We have lots of data, but we have to find that and synthesize it. They know what’s happening right in front of them.

We wanted to get that knowledge across a broad array of topics. There’s seven or eight very broad foundational topics that we’ve encouraged them to give feedback [on]. It’s a very simple tool for them to use, as easy as push-to-talk. The speech gets translated into text. It comes into a large language model, and then we are synthesizing that for knowledge and insights.

There’s a weekly synopsis that goes out to 30, 40 leaders across the organization. It’s structured by areas of feedback, product, consumer experience, marketing, you name it. They’re pretty rich insights unto themselves because, as opposed to a score, it is bulleted lists of three or four top things that we heard from the associates, and the team can take action on that.

On the pull-based side, I talk with Rexy on a regular basis. I can ask it any kind of question I want. Just like you would ask ChatGPT a question and it’d be trained on the internet, this is trained on the feedback that we get from the associates. Oftentimes it is rooted in something that I saw in the weekly report, and then I start to have a conversation so I can get a much broader landscape of understanding around the topic. I’m able to drill down into the data and get to an answer that gives me the context that I need.

As a general category, luxury brands are seeing sales slowing down. How can digital innovation help rejuvenate the category?

It’s selling products to people in emotional categories, so you’ve got to create that connection, that desire, and back it up with great products. For us, it’s everything that I’ve been speaking to. How do we understand what the consumer needs, unlock the insights, give them compelling products and experiences in the place that they’re looking to engage, where they’re living in the digital and physical space. It is the magic and the logic. That’s the logic piece, and then fueling the organization to look to deliver on the magical pieces.

I think anyone who’s developing exciting experiences, compelling product and compelling value will do just fine, but the bar is ostensibly higher.

STRATEGIES + ADVICE

There’s one often overlooked factor to improving customer loyalty: Cultivating employee loyalty. Here’s why that’s so important.

Need to improve your collaboration skills? Here are five tips from creators.

QUIZ

Preorders for which piece of campaign merchandise inspired by viral social media trends from Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz sold quickly last week?

A. A Harris-Walz camo hat

B. A lime green T-shirt that says “kamala is brat”

C. A coconut-shaped paperweight that says “Team Kamala”

D. A throw pillow that says “Couches for Harris-Walz”

See if you got the answer right here.