At EMC, we are dedicated to staying at the forefront of the ever-evolving landscape of marketing. Annually, we conduct the European Marketing Agenda (EMA), a comprehensive research initiative designed to gain valuable insights into the prevailing trends and challenges within the marketing domain across our participating member countries.
Since early 2023, the discussion around Generative AI has given a further boost to the debates on artificial intelligence (AI) and the ongoing digitalisation of marketing and sales. The disco ball of data-driven customer interaction is spinning faster and faster. However, the drama begins at the start: different ideas meet new terms and often lack fundamental strategies, data, processes, methods, and applications in marketing and sales.
Feedback from all conferences, workshops, interviews, and presentations shows that there is still a lack of fundamental elements, such as a common language and terminology. Many discussions about “Customer Experience Management” are often conducted as platitudes within the context of data-driven marketing without a common understanding of the application scenarios and requirements they are supposed to fulfil, the internal/external process landscapes they are based on, or how they could or should fit into a company-specific context. It is not about “old vs new”, “innovation vs tradition” or “brand vs digital”. Rather, it is about how instruments are repeatedly orchestrated anew along different phases and context-related customer needs. In other words: not “A or B”, but “A and B”. This presents companies with completely new challenges, from the lived cross-functional “way of working”, to the required competencies, common goal images, and IT applications.
Our ambition as marketing associations in Europe, with now more than 100,000 marketing professionals, will be in 2025 to accompany this change and present and discuss current and forward-looking concepts. A heartfelt thank you goes to all participants of the survey for the European Marketing Agenda 2025 for the multitude of suggestions, ideas, engagement, and the underlying “brain power” ... and time. We hope that the present European Marketing Agenda 2025 once again offers many suggestions and discussion points, and that we can deepen these together in 2025 in various formats across Europe. At the same time, we are very pleased that the survey will also be rolled out in Africa thanks to the African Marketing Confederation (AMC).
