Welcome to the Womenterprise: How One Billion Women Will Impact Business

The enterprise has seen many cultural and technological shifts over the past decade. And while women still make seventy cents to every dollar, there are forces at work that may challenge traditional concepts of the business world. Welcome to the Womenterprise!

More Women, More Opportunities

According to the American Enterprise Institute, women earned a majority of doctoral degrees in 2011 for third straight year, and outnumbered men in graduate school 141 to 100. And regardless of what the latest political campaign ad tells you, the Department of Labor reports that women continue to have a lower unemployment rate than men and are less likely to experience long-term unemployment. The impact of these stats has the potential to lead to more women in the workplace — one billion to be precise.

What does more women mean? According to Booz and Co., who launched its The Third Billion campaign earlier this year, “if women's economical potential can be successfully harnessed and leveraged, it would be the equivalent of having an additional one billion individuals in the work force, contributing to the global economy: often referred to as the 'third billion.'"

Elements of Global Change

There isn’t just one reason why women are more ready than ever to participate fully in a global economy, but there are several elements that have empowered women around the world in developing, emerging and industrialized nations.

• Education: more access means empowerment. The United Nations Organization for Education, Science and Culture (UNESCO) reports that more girls and women are in education than ever before, from primary through to tertiary education. However, there is still work to be done. Two thirds of the world’s illiterate adults — of which there are just under 800 million — are women, and less than 40 percent of countries provide equal access to education to both sexes.

• Technology: According to a recent report from the Wireless Association, mobile technology has helped many under-served populations, from migrant and overseas worker communities to groups of women around the world engage, empower, and create communities.

  Not only have more companies begun to develop women-focused apps that promote better education, health and access to agricultural information, but access to mobile technology has increased exponentially. The World Bank announced last week that three out of every four human beings worldwide now have access to a mobile phone. In developing countries, citizens are increasingly using mobile phones to create new livelihoods and enhance their lifestyles, while governments are using them to improve service delivery and citizen feedback mechanisms.

• Knowledge Sharing: As we know, having a company culture that supports and facilitates knowledge sharing can be instrumental to innovating, so you can only imagine the impact that sharing information can have on helping communities identify sustainable opportunities and development solutions.

   

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Meet the C-Suite: The Chief Marketing Officer Must Focus on the Customer

The onslaught of new technologies, media and marketing channels introduced within the past decade have definitely changed how the C-Suite approaches sales and marketing. Not only is the role of marketing included within a company’s key leadership positions, the responsibilities of the Chief Marketing Officer include more than just advertising and lead generation. In fact, it’s more common to have an executive who’s more content strategist than sales guru.

CMO: Marketing & Technology

The Chief Marketing Officer works closest with the Chief Technology Officer. At some companies, there’s been an emergence of a Chief Marketing Technology Officer, in which the executive must combine technology and analytical expertise to make sense of and leverage the vast amounts of customer and market data.

However, it’s still more common to see separate CMO and CTOs roaming the C-Suite. As a result, sometimes your digital marketing strategy is only as good as your technical infrastructure. However, like the CEO and CIO, who must focus on empowering employees through more efficient workflows, the CMO must empower customers to engage with a company across social networks and online communities.

More Challenges Than Success

In their 2011 CMO study, IBM uncovered a few common themes among CMOs, namely a need for better collaboration with CIOs, a more comprehensive focus on the customer and subsequent responsive communication, as well as a system of engagement that maximizes value with each interaction.

As a result, the study found that many CMOs are struggling to manage the impact of key changes in marketing. A successful CMO isn’t just a social networker, she needs to be a data scientist, adept at gleaning information from customer analytics and evolving key marketing messages accordingly.

It’s no surprise then that turnover among CMOs is quite high. According to a study by SpencerStuart, the average tenure for chief marketing officers of leading U.S. consumer brands is 42 months, which is higher than it was a few years ago, but half of what it is for a traditional CEO.

Customer Marketing Officer?

According to the following IBM CMO study infographic, the biggest problem CMOs have is adapting to the customer-centric social landscape. It’s not about market trends — it’s about the customer. Additionally, it’s not about the data, it’s about how data can help build relationships.

 

What Does the Future of the CMO Hold?

When the economy is good, great marketing is just icing on the cake. When times are tough, marketing is often the first to blame for bleak sales. While the CMO must focus on both data and customer relations, at the end of the day, it's all about the bottom line.

However, a company must invest in the cultural, organizational and technological infrastructure so that a CMO can spend more time fine-tuning key messages for the appropriate audience, rather than building the foundation upon which great content can be delivered. You can't have one without the other, and a CMO is hard pressed to do it all, making it essential that the C-Suite works together to support one another.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com