By Tom French, Laura LaBerge, and Paul Magill

For more than a decade, marketing organizations have struggled to cope with the deeper relationship consumers now crave with products and brands. Customers need to be engaged through an expanding array of touch points, yet chief marketing officers are working with the same or fewer resources. They’ve tacked on social media staff to engage with customers online, and built internal publishing units to create and deliver content. They’ve conducted new types of research to achieve deeper insight into customers, and adopted marketing management software to automate and integrate processes. They’ve rethought approaches to strategy development and internal collaboration, altered reporting structures, and overhauled governance systems to ensure accountability. And yet the demands keep rising.

That’s only likely to continue. “Push” marketing has been subsumed by a complicated two-way relationship that begins well before a product is ever purchased and then continues indefinitely. A consumer’s ongoing experience with a company which directly influences whether they choose to buy a product or service and determines their subsequent loyalty—today results from every single interaction they have, planned or unplanned, whether or not it’s within the marketing organization’s control.

That’s why we believe that in the era of engagement, marketing must become pervasive: the marketing function needs to renegotiate its role and the role of other functions in driving customer engagement through every touch point. Everyone, everywhere within a company needs to recognize their unique role and responsibility in attracting, satisfying, and retaining customers. We're all marketers now.

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