Executives around the world are prioritizing investments and capabilities that can help accelerate business growth.According to McKinsey Research, 78% of CEOs now look to marketing leaders to drive growth. However, we’re not talking about your everyday CMO. Driving business growth requires a new generation of 360-degree CMOs and marketers who take a holistic, data-driven 360-degree approach to customer experience transformation and innovation.
McKinsey’s research found that three elements, the “growth trio” of creativity, analysis, and purpose, delivered at least twice as much growth as peers that didn’t invest in all three at the same time.
This new breed of growth engineer represents much more than traditional marketing. They are stewards of a more people-centric business, implementing innovation and customer engagement around insight, creativity, and a common understanding of “why” they do what they do.
The opportunities are profound.
McKinsey found that only 7% of companies achieve the growth trio by unifying creativity, analysis and purpose. They drove average revenue growth of 2.3x compared to their peers in 2018-19 (2.7x compared to their peers in 2019-20).
In 2018-19, companies using only one of these capabilities (creativity, analysis or purpose) grew on average by more than 6%. After adding the second component, the growth rate climbed to over 7%. For enterprises with full triple play, the growth rate climbed to over 12%.
I had a great opportunity to work with Biljana Cvetanovski, a report co-author and partner at McKinsey & Company. Together we showcase the future of business growth at Cannes. We also discussed the research with DisrupTV hosts Ray Wang and Vala Afshar.
Steps to becoming a 360-degree growth leader
1) Know your customers. Then, explore opportunities to meet their basic expectations and imagine and experiment with ways to fascinate them.
2) Make creativity, analysis (i.e. insight) and purpose central to your company culture. This starts with leadership and is reinforced in organizational norms and governance.
3) Make the team part of the growth. Motivate them to collaborate and experiment. Challenge them to identify routines and processes that hinder transformation. Drive the development of innovative approaches.
4) Reorganize customer impact teams around the new customer journey to optimize insight and engagement at every step before, during, and after purchase.
