Taking marketing innovation from hype to impact: A playbook for finance CMOs

Finance CMOs are under increasing pressure from multiple angles, including: 

• Stricter regulations 

• Rising competition from fintech and challenger banks

• Growing customer expectations when it comes to personalization and digital experiences 

• Increasing scrutiny from boards to demonstrate ROI  

CMOs are also subject to drawn-out product launches and campaign cycles that are slow, siloed and limit them from keeping the pace required to remain innovative in a highly regulated and competitive space. 

In this post, I cover how CMOs can address these pressures, give their innovation projects the best chance of success with the right metrics and data and help them prove the financial value of marketing. 

TL;DR 

1. CMOs are under increasing pressure: Fintech competitors, stricter regulations, consumer demands for hyper-personalization and demands for marketing to provide ROI.

2. Transparency, early-stage risk mitigation, project forecasts and tying innovation initiatives back to financial metrics are all essential. 

3. Rapid testing and early-stage qualitative and quantitative consumer feedback provide a great foundation to support a project’s success. 

4. AI tools can quickly deliver the insights you need to know whether or not you should move forward with a project. 

From savvy fintech competition to rising customer demands for personalization in the AI age, CMOs are facing unprecedented innovation challenges. 

Consumers are showing higher expectations for hyper personalized and user-friendly digital experiences from their financial institutions. 54% of U.S. consumers say they want their financial providers to use their financial data to personalize their experience. While 66% of consumers say they expect their bank or credit union to know, understand and reward them. Yet, only 34% of them currently feel like their provider treats them like an individual. 

There's a growing personalization gap within the industry with 4 in 5 financial institutions saying they make personalization a priority, yet only 21% of customers say they get personalized advice or guidance from their banks. Frustrations with lack of personalization and usability are also big reasons why consumers are turning to fintechs and challenger banks for their financial services needs. In fact,  data shows that 59% of consumers recently took out a financial services product from a provider that wasn't their primary bank. 

CMOs are also facing a rise in regulatory scrutiny, with acts such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) policy to police unfair, deceptive, or abusive acts or practices (in short, UDAAP) and Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) Marketing Rule, putting limitations on their creative risk taking. Internally, CMOs are also under increasing pressure from boards to demonstrate measurable outcomes and marketing ROI. But they often find themselves contending with limited budgets, siloed data and outdated infrastructure — resulting in product launches and campaign cycles that are too slow, too siloed and fail to deliver results. 

With mounting pressure on CMOs, innovation can no longer afford to be experimental. It needs to deliver. 

Many organizations often get caught in the next big product idea or concept — grand concepts that aren’t always closely guided by current customer needs and are disconnected from business metrics. 

There are several essential elements to innovation that delivers results. The first is transparency. Everyone on your team must have a clear understanding of foundational goals, detailed steps for achieving them and understand the metrics you'll use to measure success. Beyond transparency, you'll also need to forecast the project's impact, such as predicted ROI, customer lifetime value, customer acquisition cost, cost per lead, cost per acquisition and brand equity. This will help you strategically allocate your budget to projects with a high-projected value. Early-stage risk mitigation also needs to be built into every project — that means identifying and categorizing key risk indicators (KRI) and putting plans in place to mitigate them up front. 

As a CMO, you’re also continually up against internal skepticism about marketing’s value. 47% of CMOs reported that marketing is seen by their organization as an expense rather than a strategic investment. A key contributor to this poor perception often originates from higher-level marketers’ struggle to quantify and validate marketing's tangible value to a business. Notably, only 52% of senior marketing leaders proved successful when it came to demonstrating the value of marketing to the rest of their organization. What differentiated the leaders who were successful from those who weren't? Successful leaders were 1.8 times more likely to use complex, business-outcome-oriented metrics like customer lifetime value and return on ad spend to guide and measure their projects. 

When you don’t tie your innovation goals back to complex business-orientated metrics, it’s easy to become distracted and thrown off course by the next big creative idea. Financial and consumer metrics provide grounding and purpose — tying each step of your innovation initiatives to your wider long-term goals, protecting your resources from misallocation and helping you more easily prove the financial value of your marketing.

Metrics like customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value and margin can help you easily measure the progress and impact of innovation and demonstrate the value to the rest of your organization. 

Early-stage consumer feedback is essential to helping you pre-empt the best marketing decisions for the current market, reduce risk and turn projected value into validated value — giving you a unique insight into the concepts that will have the most impact on your key metrics. 

You can use early-stage consumer insights to validate your product and feature concepts before you allocate more of your budget to them. Learn and iterate from the earliest stages of concept, offering, pricing and more with qualitative and quantitative consumer insights that provide both depth and breadth. 

AI tools are also essential for speeding up quantitative and qualitative insight generation, allowing you to collect data and act quickly on market and consumer shifts. The latest research shows that AI typically analyzes data up to 100 times faster than traditional methods, making it ideal for brands that want to stay agile and competitive. The right AI-powered tools can help you easily organize and provide insights into your data. 

For example, concept testing can give you a numerical scoring and ranking of your product concept and packaging ideas with consumers — helping you easily organize and understand your data. While consumer insights tools that offer benchmarking allow you to compare your projects numerical performance against an exhaustive database of similar projects within your industry. 

In the current economic climate, stress testing is even more essential. This means going beyond basic validation and focusing on scenario testing that proactively helps to de-risk your launch. Use scenario testing to test how pricing sensitivity, the effectiveness of your packaging and the clarity of your messaging will hold up under a range of challenging contexts, such as an economic turndown, rising competition or an unexpected change in financial regulations. This process can help you make sure you’re making robust creative decisions regardless of the shifts and pressures in the external environment.

The first step to generating the insights you need to make smarter, more strategic creative decisions that impact your metrics is data centralization. The average business uses up to 300 pieces of software. That means that some of your most important insights are siloed away in disparate systems. Connected consumer insights platforms like Zappi centralize your past research, current tests and consumer data in a single central system — making it easy to analyze and pull insights from your data. 

Traditional research cycles are typically rigid in nature, slowing down innovation timelines and making it difficult for brands to stay agile in the face of market and consumer shifts. Zappi’s latest AI-based Innovation solutions reduce cycle times across ideation, allowing you to quickly access the insights you need to help you build upon and perfect your concepts, packaging and more. Many marketing teams use Zappi to reduce their ideation and concept timelines from weeks or months to hours — quickly moving you from testing to optimizing then launching. 

Zappi was built to support iterative product and campaign development by giving financial organizations the tools they need to access continuous consumer research. Backed by the latest in AI innovation, Zappi facilitates agile research cycles and helps you learn and iterate from the earliest stages of concept, offering, pricing and campaign development. Our platform offers a range of features including pack and price testing, concept testing and idea screening to help you make data-backed, confident decisions that help you grow your brand. Zappi is also a great tool for helping to mitigate and manage risk. Our suite of predictive analytics and optimization capabilities can help you reduce risk, ensure regulatory alignment and spot bias or pitfalls early.

By using data analytics and our extensive database of data on historical creative and concept tests, you can more accurately predict how your next concept or offering will perform and what its potential ROI could be. 

As a CMO, you’re forever up against corporate skepticism. The more data backed and metric guided you can make your marketing decisions, the more internal credibility you’ll build. With the right systems and metrics as your foundation, you can prove marketing isn’t just a creative exercise — it’s a strategic function that delivers real financial value.

Use data dashboards, ROI reports, validated quick wins and more with the help of an AI-based consumer insights platform like Zappi to build momentum and prove the financial value of your concepts early. Focus on developing a culture of innovation based on the philosophy that testing is about learning over winning. It’s essential to institutionalize learning; seeing every test as the building block for your next iteration. Failures aren’t failures — they’re lessons. Lessons that will move you towards financial growth. 

Discover how Zappi’s Innovation System can help finance CMOs lower risk, drive product and campaign innovation faster and deliver measurable ROI in regulated markets.