Once upon a time, the world of the marketer was very simple: acquire people’s attention and then shout the loudest. This approach worked well with fewer channels and longer attention spans. Today, however, we are assailed with literally hundreds if not thousands of messages every day, with algorithms that predict exactly what to serve our audiences and when.
The business of marketing is now fiendishly complex to master. One wrong step and brands that have taken years to build can suffer catastrophic damage. Those swaggering, sharp suits of marketers now seem an anachronism, and have instead been replaced by the savvy hipsters who “get” the finely tuned interplay between offline and online channels, algorithms, and empathy.
At the root of the successful marketer is an agile mindset coupled with an ability to adapt to consumer dynamics that can switch at warp speed. By experimenting with a host of evolving tools and technologies to test and find out what motivates customers to buy certain products, a good marketing person can track the path to purchase whilst optimising the customer and brand experience.
An explosion of jobs in the next 10 years
Quite simply, concerns about a “jobless future” in marketing miss the mark. In fact, in a recent report from Cognizant, we identified 21 new jobs that we believe will emerge over the next 10 years and become the cornerstone of marketing. Here are six examples of what these newly created roles would look like:
Mood and empathy manager
Do you know how a customer instinctively feels about your company? Could you engineer the right feelings at precisely the right time, so customers decide to engage longer? The ability to manufacture the optimal blend of emotions and elicit the right empathy response from customers is the must-have dimension of the modern marketing relationship.
Mood and empathy managers play an important role in industries like retail, where competition on price and goods has reached a plateau, and emotions are the next battlefield.
Neuro A/B tester
Organisations will soon move away from surveys and focus groups to capture qualititave data. It will be the job of the neuro A/B tester to report on the brain activity of customers when they come into physical contact with a brand during experiential and sensory campaigns.
Sixth sense analyst
A trend-spotter might have a pulse on nascent marketing behaviours and opportunities, but going one step further and predicting trends before they happen is the job of a sixth sense analyst. This role requires converting AI-driven predictive intelligence data into actionable customer insights, helping inform the development of trendsetting products and services.
Purpose planner
We know that “purpose” is the new commercial battleground, and the marketing industry will need people to conceive, shape and launch dedicated purpose journeys for organisations as they seek differentiation. The aim of this role will be to define and articulate a brand’s contribution to society and its purpose for both customers and prospective employees.
Head of bot creative
The head of bot creative will ensure that bots deliver an authenic and compelling experience, tied to brand differentiation. They will be responsible for interograting the output from automated software, working closely with programmers to make sure bots are delivering creative messages to the right audiences.
Data ethnographers
Data ethnographers use numbers to tell a story about how customers interact with a brand. They know how to read data and extract human insights to inspire fresh ideas, uncover new marketing angles and provide a competitive edge. This role is going to become more and more essential in the digital era, given the mountains of customer data we collect from online and offline touchpoints including IoT, wearables and mobile devices.
We truly believe that the 21 marketing jobs we have identified will create opportunities for employment, providing work for the many marketing executives, who are perhaps confused by the havoc that the rapid acceleration of technology means. The jobs we describe here are not science fiction – they are likely to be roles a CMO will ask HR departments to fill and the CFO to fund before too long.
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