What are the key consumer drivers in your market, and in what order?

The Fable of the Misinformed CMO: "Virtually 99% of CMOs cannot accurately identify the order of importance of drivers for their categories."

Here's a really interesting article on chiefmarketer.com about determining and ordering the key drivers in your market. The idea, generally, is that marketers tend to rely on their own sense of their market, after all, they [should] know it very very well. But the truth is that we don't know our market like our customers and prospects know our market, we know it too well.

In today’s marketplace, consumers are always right and CMOs are frequently misinformed. And I wish that were the moral of the story, but there’s more. We are talking about brands and not the Elgin Marbles, so you have to constantly monitor how consumers “see” the categories because the categories constantly morph and consumer values constantly shift. And with those changes we always see the category drivers shifting their order.

Having the tools to monitor and re-order the drivers and the discipline and processes to adjust strategies based on the findings is essential to success in the new world of marketing.