Just 16% of marketers believe they are truly responsive to consumer needs – and thus capable of making rapid alterations to products, experiences, services, and packaging based on evolving shopper demands.
Another 45% of brand custodians rate their company's responsiveness level – when defined as the "ability to know, understand and then react to the consumer" – as "fairly good", and 36% concurred that it "depends on the channel".
Overall, these figures indicate that most marketers are lagging behind the expectations of today's consumers – standards that, in turn, are increasingly being set by nimble, flexible, instant-gratification pioneers such as Amazon, YouTube and Netflix.
Those are among the headline findings from a survey of 153 senior marketers conducted by the CMO Council, the executive network, in partnership with Danaher, a Washington, DC-based enterprise with a business portfolio spanning product design, manufacturing, and marketing.