Contemporary Issues in Marketing in 2024

Honoured to be invited back to guest lecture to 3rd Year Business Management Students at St Mary’s University, Twickenham on "Contemporary Issues in Marketing".

Always a topic that causes some reflection - many “issues” haven’t changed for, coughs, decades (understanding the customer, building a point of differentiation, being smart on channels, sales/marketing alignment, etc. etc.). But thinking on "contemporary" issues I picked these five:

💥 Consumer Choice - the war for attention / how the customer controls the purchase journey / lack of brand loyalty.
💥 Channel complexity - so many choices, so little budget / using creativity to cut through the digital noise / the yearly rise of new social channels.
💥 Sustainability - driven by millennials, consumers demanding greater brand transparency on DEI & sustainability.
💥 Skills - marketers needing to be much more multi-faceted across business, creative, data & program management / tools change, skills don’t.
💥 AI - of course! No tech is ever a silver bullet and our track record of implementing tech in marketing is, quite frankly, poor. But those who embrace AI will win over those that don't.

There are many more I could've added…

Lots of great questions from the students too on (unsurprisingly) AI, innovation and ethics in marketing.

Great to see such an engaged group. Thanks again Lucy Timms for the invite!

#marketing #learning #marketingstrategy