The new battle ground for marketing-led growth.

In the digital age, consumers are always shopping around. New research shows that hooking them early is the strongest path to growth.

The CEO of a branded apparel company was troubled and began putting some tough questions to the marketing department. The company had spent substantially on promotions and loyalty-rewards programs to drive much-needed growth based on studies showing that targeting current consumers with marketing investments offered the highest return. Yet sales results were disappointing, and an alarming number of customers were drifting away after their initial purchases. They were often going to a rival with a different marketing approach, one that deployed social media to lure shoppers to its website, where—even the chief marketing officer had to admit—creative interactions were attracting new consumers to consider the rival's brand.

If you’re the CEO of, say, a consumer-products company—or one in banking, travel, autos, or other categories where it’s easy for your consumers to compare products—you may be finding yourself similarly perplexed, and with reason. Powerful new currents are disrupting established patterns of behavior. And consumers, including those you may have thought loyal, are considering someone else’s offerings more often than you realize. With top-line growth at the top of every CEO’s agenda, cracking the code of consumer behavior is more critical than ever.

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How to get most from your agency relationships

Executives who know how to set up and manage agency relationships are best positioned to improve their marketing ROI.

As January draws to a close, many of our New Year’s resolutions have already faded. But as marketers look for new ways to drive growth in 2017, they should take fresh stock of their agency relationships.

Marketer-agency relationships are more important than ever.  While the shift to digital channels and technologies has created the opportunity to personalize communications with the "always-on consumer," it has also made it harder to stand out out.  This has led to a complex and ever-expanding ecosystem of creative, media, analytics, social, and other agencies than can access specialized expertise.  Managing a broader set of agency relationships, however, comes with its own significant challenges.  Not only is the digital landscape more fluid, but matching the right content to the right channel demands different ways of working with and across agencies and new ways of measuring performance.  Questions around media transparency, viewability, ad blocking, and even fraud have also sown confusion.

Here are five questions to help keep your agency relationships on the right footing.

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