I recently gave a talk on the main stage of the Consumer Goods Technology Sales and Marketing Summit in New York City titled what is keeping marketers up at night, specifically what is top of mind for CPG and retail marketers.

It is a complex web of partnerships and services that bring consumer products to market and technology is a strong component of making it happen. Yet, more and more brands are either finding or seeking a direct relationship with consumers.

We are more plugged in than we've been to date, often more informed and intensely time starved. 

This means that marketers have an opportunity — to integrate product, promotion, place, and pricing in a way that makes sense and that transforms the marketing from mere messaging to tool to help us get the job done better, more easily, conveniently, etc.

To move from novelty — in apps, services, even new products — into necessity for consumers, marketers need to close the gap in:

• content production — providing the right information at the right time, and also re-thinking content as part of service, and an asset to the organization
• technical skills — this is not just about coding; it is about becoming comfortable with making decisions about right sizing tech to deliver a useful experience
• analytics — more than just capturing data, this is about learning to make use of it to inform decisions

It is still early days and many brands are finding that there is a time for efficiency in the process, and there is a time where experimentation is the name of the game.

More to come (typepad service still extremely spotty, so posting what I can)