Challenges of Marketing

In April and May 2023, the Nuremberg Institute for Market Decisions (NIM) surveyed a total of 805 marketing decision-makers in eight countries on the following topics

1. What concerns/challenges do marketing managers currently see?
2. What trends do marketers see when it comes to marketing tools?
3. What challenges will need to be overcome in the respective industry in the future?

The NIM is thus not only continuing the "Marketing Challenges" study series, which the institute last conducted in 2019, but is also extending the analysis to an international context. Marketing decision-makers in companies based in Germany, France, Italy, the UK, the USA, Japan, Brazil and South Africa were included. 

The answers to these open, i.e. completely unaided, questions vary even more in an international comparison than in previous years, when the study was only conducted in Germany.

For reasons of comparability, the coding of the open answers was based on the code plans of the study in Germany – as in the past expanded to include current topics.

A first insight:

• From the perspective of decision-makers, the development of sales markets/channels is currently the most frequently mentioned challenge in marketing. The categories of communication strategies/channels and product policy/product development were mentioned almost as frequently. These are followed at some distance by topics such as prices and cost, customer orientation or staff situation and the labor market.
• The urgency of these current challenges varies from country to country, as this international study also reveals. While marketing decision-makers in Germany, for example, are the most relaxed about product policy and product development, those in the USA are comparatively more concerned.

Another insight:

• Marketing tools that decision-makers expect to become more important in the coming years are primarily to be found in the area of online activities and in the complex of competencies, technology and market understanding. The latter includes tools such as automation, artificial intelligence, market research and data analysis.

• Managers in European countries are more likely to explicitly mention artificial intelligence in the context of marketing tools. Decision-makers in the USA, Japan, Brazil and South Africa, on the other hand, see technical change and automation more as a future challenge for their industry.

This leads to insight number 3:

• Marketing managers believe that competition, to which we add technological change, will be by far the biggest challenge for their own industry in the future. In second place, the economic, social or demographic development follows with a greater distance. In this context, the topic of sustainability is given comparatively little importance.
• As far as the countries included in the study, there is broad agreement on this. What is particularly striking is the strongly divergent assessment of marketing managers in companies based in Germany. Here, it is not competitiveness that is the most frequently mentioned challenge but, by far, the economic, social or demographic development.