I remember hearing Barb Stymiest, then the CEO of the TSX, comment that she was glad she had not chosen Marketing as her major in University, settling for accounting and finance which had turned out to be so much more interesting and substantive in nature.
Wonder what she would say, were I to interview her today. Gone are the days when marketers could get by without being a numbers person: today’s marketer is a “centrist” – not left-brained, not right-brained, but able to be creative and analytical. What’s more, marketers needs a strong foundation across a core set of competencies that span both spheres of our brains: analytics, costing, forecasting, design, web technology, customer psychology, and more.
For existing marketers, the need to get up-to-speed on the newer topics especially those leveraging emerging technologies doesn’t have to be daunting or require a trip back to either an online or physical classroom. Resources abound for anyone willing to spend a little time to explore and learn. Consider analytics. IBM, for example, provides a resource through its CIO-CMO Knowledge Exchange which helps marketers – no matter their knowledge level – understand the power of analytics and how they can drive value in their organizations. Videos, white papers, case studies and other resources are all categorized and aligned under one of three categories:
What’s more, where analytics are concerned, IBM software helps the marketer be an expert, without being a statistician or a techie. With software that not only gathers the data for analysis but interprets it, a marketer can quickly make the journey from “insights” to “actions” smoother, faster, accurate and focused on outcomes. To put this even more into perspective, anyone in IT who is looking to help marketing out, would do well by exploring the IBM portal. And anyone scared by the words Big Data or Analytics need not be; all the resources you might need are only a click away.
