Sixty-six percent of marketing leaders reported that their end consumers were very sensitive or extremely sensitive to variations in packaging color and consistency, reports the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council in a recently released survey report. The report, titled “The Responsiveness Requirement: How Agile Marketers Act on Consumer Feedback to Drive Growth,” draws on new research undertaken by the CMO Council in partnership with X-Rite, Pantone, Esko, MediaBeacon and AVT, all global innovators in the marketing and product packaging supply chains.

The CMO Council study investigated how organizations are faring when it comes to responding to customers and leveraging customer data and intelligence to deliver the right experience in the right moment and through the channel of the customer’s choice, whether it is a digital or physical touchpoint. The report looks at some of the obstacles in achieving a consistent, connected brand experience across all marketing channels.

Key findings of the report include:

• Marketing leaders rank product packaging and in-store displays as more important to the success of the overall experience than channels like email, direct mail and mobile apps, which fail to crack the “Top 10 List” of critical channels.
• Responding quickly to consumer feedback and requests through physical touchpoints such as product packaging and other physical branded elements is a significant challenge for marketers, and marketers have not prioritized addressing this challenge. Respondents noted a gap between their ability to make changes to physical media and their aspirations for speed: 84% said they would like to be able to make changes within 30 days, but only 40% currently report that they can.
• 46 percent of respondents said that functional silos across the marketing landscape have separated teams into physical or digital groups, enabling specialization and functional focus but making alignment and cohesion across these channels even more difficult.

“If brands can’t respond quickly and with great control, they will be seen as irrelevant,” says Ron Voigt, President of X-Rite. “Responsiveness is the result of digitizing, automating and connecting processes in the color workflow such that instead of taking weeks, they take days or even hours. We look forward to working with our brand and converter customers to help them meet this requirement.”

In order to rise to the responsiveness challenge, organizations must simplify their value supply chain by digitizing tasks, automating workflows, and systems and improving communication among teams, departments and suppliers. X-Rite, a global leader in color science and technology, helps brands improve color communication and achieve color consistency across the entire workflow from design to production in order to ensure high quality commercial print and printed packaging the first time and every time. X-Rite helps digitize and automate the workflow process across the entire supply chain providing quality control and reporting solutions that connect design with production. This improves productivity and enables a company to respond quickly to changing market or customer demands.

The CMO Council study was conducted in the spring of 2017 and includes input from more than 153 senior marketing executives. Fifty-four (54) percent of respondents hold a title of CMO, Head of Marketing or Senior Vice President of Marketing, and 33 percent represent brands with revenues in excess of $1 billion (USD).