future marketing visionJanuary 2, 2025 — Co-Creating Tomorrow Today with the ClearAction Value Exchange

This morning you reveled in appreciation of a much better world as a marketer. Your musings started with your work-life quality, your department’s synchronization, and your customers’ experience.

As a long-time CMO, you were grateful for the wealth of resources at your disposal, including the budget authority to invest in what you needed most. Could you say the same about your team members? You determined, no, your people were not fully equipped to do the job, learn and grow. You decided to invest in bridging that gap with a enterprise subscription to the ClearAction Value Exchange.

Empowered: When the middleware concept was first introduced to you as a way to facilitate your team’s co-creation and capability-building in marketing accountability, alignment and agility, you were intrigued. How did a concept from the computer software world find its way into marketing management? No surprise really, as you thought about how concepts like agile, lean enterprise and design thinking found their way into marketing. Similar to why your customers sought your organization’s expertise to articulate and resolve a persistent problem, you realized a novel approach to individual and team empowerment might just be a difference maker in your organization too.

Experiential: You used to try to get fresh perspective from the experts via their thought leadership on the web, but that didn’t work very well. Strategic recommendations from respected experts were often too big a pill to swallow. “How to” recipes were hit and miss (mostly miss) because they didn’t fit the realities of your situation. Even if you came across some great ideas that might work in your world, you realized that they were typically presented in a way in which they couldn’t be fully embraced. As you thought about marketing efficiency and effectiveness resources on the web, you observed they were primarily only delivered in forms you could watch (videos/webcasts), read (articles, white papers, reports, e-books) or ask/argue (Q & A forums). As a CMO, you had developed strong skills in learning via these mechanisms. Unfortunately, you did not see that ability in most of your people. You recognized that they learned differently than you do.

Applied: That’s where the idea of middleware came in. Different learning modalities needed to be supported, especially hands-on learning that is the preferred method for millenials. Your marketing team needed access to dynamic expert guidance without relying on the hand-holding of an expert. They needed to be able to apply that guidance in a way that sticks — to not just understand the guidance but absorb it, apply it and adopt it as a new behavior. You realized that the Marketing Future Forum provided a suite of tools and services to achieve exactly that. The rest is history.

So here it is, 2025, and you are stoked. Leveraging the ClearAction Value Exchange, your marketers are experts in identifying and closing gaps you never thought possible. They can tackle many accountability, alignment and agility gaps that used to block marketing progress on their own but also know when they need help, what they need, and how and where to get it. Everyone is happier than ever, producing unprecedented results for your enterprise. Welcome to the future of marketing!

Image purchased under license from Shutterstock.

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