R3 brought together nine senior finance leaders in Shanghai for our inaugural CFO Roundtable to discuss finance’s growing role in marketing, the rise of digital and ROI best practice.
CFOs and regional finance directors from Coca-Cola, Ferrero, UCB, General Mills, Johnson & Johnson, Fonterra, Education First , PSA and others took advantage of the opportunity to network and share insights into the challenges facing finance and marketing, both in their specific sectors and the industry as a whole.
R3 briefly shared some statistics on consumer digital behavior in China with insights from our EnSpire Digital Index, but as per usual the discussion was primarily driven by the CFOs. We dedicated some time to breakout groups to focus on topics such as ecommerce, channel management, and marketing. When the groups reconvened for discussion, some clear themes began to emerge.
Digital Changes Everything
The rise of digital has transformed the way companies approach marketing. The participants agreed that while opportunities like brand awareness and increased profits through the rapid expansion of social media and ecommerce platforms have been positive, new problems have arisen such as lack of transparency, digital fraud, and difficulty measuring ROI. The attendees weighed in on how they have felt the effects:
“Digital is very strong in our company now, because traditional ATL media is so expensive,” said Stephan Deschamps of Fonterra.
“The rules have changed – it’s now important for our team to better understand the marketing channels and develop a clearer point of view on ROI” said Ying Liu from Education First.
“We’re quite disciplined and review things quarterly – we look closely at the ROI change and we try to really select marketing strategies and tactics within the budget,” added Susan Wu from General Mills.
A Tweet to My CMO
To close the session, we asked the attendees what they would say to their CMO in one short sentence. The “tweets” reflected the key themes that emerged during the discussion, with one CFO saying, “ROI. ROI. ROI,” and another adding, “Link every action to business.” All of the attendees agreed that better alignment on KPIs and goals between marketing and finance is the key to moving forward and getting the most out of marketing dollars.
