• by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer, August 26, 2010

According to a new study by Accenture "Onward and Up - How Marketers Are Refocusing the Front Office for Growth," finds that marketers have significant barriers to overcome to achieve their professed strategic objectives of improving operational efficiency, increasing profitability and responding effectively to change.

The marketers find their objectives have taken on increased importance since, over the last two years, they have been challenged to shift from doing the same with less to doing more with the same.

The 400 senior marketing executives surveyed for the study across Asia Pacific, Europe and North America said the barriers they must overcome to achieve those objectives are:

• 21% of marketers say they are faced with inefficient business practices
• 17% say inadequate funding or other resources
• 15% claim insufficient integration with other business functions
• 13% acknowledge a lack of required skills  
• 6% lack of access to the customer data they need

Additionally, only 23% of the marketers said their organizations excelled in customer analytics, innovation, customer engagement and marketing operations at the same time and 33% said they did not perform well in any of those areas. 

To achieve their growth objectives, marketers most frequently said they must master customer analytics, offer innovation, and improve customer engagement and marketing operations. 

However, few marketers say they perform well in all four core marketing area components that are perceived as important, and for which the performance is self-assessed as "above average" or "leading edge"

Marketers most frequently said they did not make effective use of online communities (cited by 43% of marketers), direct mail and telemarketing (37%); new digital marketing (34%); and online advertising (31%). 

The three business issues the marketers most frequently said they want to address are customer retention and loyalty, new customer acquisition and sales numbers among existing customers.   But they reported that changes in customer expectations are impacting their marketing strategies.  For instance:

• 72% of them said that "most or all" of their customers expect more value for money
• 71% said customers have higher product quality expectations
• 69% said customers are increasingly price sensitive
• 68% said customers have higher customer service expectations
• 66% said customers expect businesses to have greater respect for their time.

Dave Rich, managing director of Accenture Customer Relationship Management consulting group and Accenture Analytics, concludes that "It boils down to meeting customer expectations... organizations that understand their customers will be the best positioned to achieve their growth strategies in the face of increasingly difficult challenges."

To download the PDF file for the complete report, please visit Accenture here.