Chapter 5: Anticipating Tomorrow.
Predicting the capabilities of the future.
To start to build for the future requires an understanding of how marketing roles are changing, so we can use the observable direction of travel to project forward.
To that end, we carried out a quantitative study amongst people working within marketing and marketing services, to identify how the type of work is changing, and to see if we can draw any insights.
This started with the categorisation of the different types of functions carried out by people working within the broader field of marketing communications. A list of day-to-day functions was created, which we reduced to 35 functions based around six disciplines:
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Reporting
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Analyzing
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Planning
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Originating
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Producing
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Executing
Part 1: Research
The first part of the research was to establish the degree to which each of the 35 functions are carried out regularly over a ten-year period. The survey showed a dramatic 51 percent increase in the overall activity, indicating increasing requirement for marketers and agencies to contend with an extending set of capabilities.
Part 2: Looking Ahead
We then asked respondents to predict the regularity of carrying out these functions ten or so years from now, to allow us to see the functions that may fall away, relative to the others, and those that will become more prevalent. The data suggests a further increase in overall activity, albeit not to the degree that we experienced in the last 10 years. However, we must not read too much into this, as there will be functions emerging that are not yet included in this list.
Below are the 35 functions ranked in order of the degree to which they are regularly carried out today across the entire global marketing communications industry.
