A New Survey Reports Brand Marketing A More Important Skill Requirement Than Digital Marketing
A recent survey suggests brand marketing has overtaken digital marketing as a key skill for new marketing employees
In fact, it has been suggested by a recent survey carried out by recruitment firm Michael Page that brand marketing has overtaken digital marketing as the most important skill for new marketing employees. The firm questioned 500 UK marketing employers and found that nearly a third (29 per cent) had named ‘brand’ as the most important function of a marketing team to help grow a business in 2013. This was up from 19 per cent in the previous year.
The survey found that online and web development had dropped from first in last year’s survey to joint-second, with 21 per cent of marketers identifying it as their most vital skill. Paul Sykes, managing director of Michael Page, said this change may have something to do with the ‘cautious and competitive’ state of the market today, in which ‘brand differentiation’ is becoming increasingly vital to driving market share.
But this of course does not mean that digital marketing is in any way on the decline. How can it be when so many companies today are choosing to conduct almost all their business and marketing online? Email marketing, social media marketing, SEO marketing – the tools and technologies for these are constantly being refined and updated. It is more likely that digital marketing is increasingly being perceived as ‘embedded’ in the entire marketing package.
The research firm Forrester has predicted as much when it suggested that digital is set to lose its prefix and simply being referred to as ‘marketing’ in 2013 as all marketers’ output will become ‘inherently digital’ over the coming months. In its ‘Trends for the B2C CMO to watch in 2013’ report, it warns that marketers must expand the ‘utility and value’ of the online experience their brands deliver.
It advises CMOs to work across departments to assess their digital readiness and identify where messages, actions and products can be improved through digital means. Brand marketing and digital marketing are not really even two separate concepts: they are inherently intertwined.