By Guest Blogger Billee Howard, Founder and Chief Engagement Officer of Brandthropologie

Here are the top 9 emerging trends CMOs must watch for in the year ahead that will impact innovation and the customer landscape. As we know, the CMO function is currently among the most vital, while also the most volatile.

These 9 emerging trends are designed to enhance your agility in the year ahead:

1) Sound will continue to emerge as the new word, with the audio headphone industry surpassing the $13 billion mark by 2016….

Follow me back 45 years ago, when my Mom invited me to skip school and visit Dad’s office at Litton Industries.

This represented a BIG adventure to me. I knew Dad was a mechanical engineer, but I never truly understood what his job entailed. This was my chance to get answers.

We pulled up to the four story, steel gray industrial building in West Hartford, Connecticut. As we exited the elevator, I spotted Dad in the conference room….

By Guest Blogger Deanna Zaucha, Senior Specialist of Content Marketing for Webs and Pagemodo

Independence Day will come and go, but it never fails to set the momentum for the holiday season to come. For marketers, holidays are a great time of the year to drive traffic and encourage engagement with customers. However, we’re often faced with outdated and stagnant social media campaigns.

For your marketing campaign to stay ahead of the curve and stand out in a crowd, it should be memorable, unique and most importantly, engaging….

We just completed our first annual CMOs Leading Innovation Conference (CLIC ’15) in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia. Although this full day session deserves more reflection than a David Letterman-style Top Ten List, I wanted to pass along my initial thoughts.

Twenty-five CMOs and CEOs gathered from cool companies such as Twitter, Informatica, H&R Block, SageWater, Gannett/USAToday, Decision Lens, XO Communications, Celerity, and DestinationDC. Adobe’s CMO.com, a globally reknown publication reaching over 22,000 marketing leaders, partnered with us to cover the event….

What does the term “customer data” mean to you?

Many tech-savvy marketers will imagine a magical dashboard showing customer churn rates,  pipeline velocity, lifetime customer value and the cost to acquire a customer. And the topic of customer data is top of mind for many CMOs in my community. Let’s examine why a frenetic level of focus on technology-generated customer data is often a waste of marketing resources.

We just completed our third annual CMO Innovation Trends study….

As a gift, I’m sharing a preview into what Daina Middleton will be sharing at the CMOs Leading Innovation Conference (CLIC ’15), September 23, in Tysons Corner VA (a DC suburb). She’s the Head of Global Marketing at Twitter.

Daina’s session is entitled “The Nurturist Organization: 5 Values for Innovative Companies Who Want to Thrive In the Participation Age.”

Marketing touches so many departments across companies today that adopting singular values that only operate under the CMO are not enough….

By Guest Blogger Juliana Smith Holterhaus, Head of Strategic Alliances for Your Eye
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More than 10 years after the debut of Dove’s “Real Beauty” program, it remains an advertising icon and source of controversy. It’s impossible to deny the program’s success in terms of brand exposure: The viral popularity of specific program elements significantly outperformed paid placements….

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There are many different strategies involved in mindful marketing, from using intentional language to designing our customer communities in a new way. It can be hard to implement all of these things in our companies at once. Where to begin?

In this video, I offer guidance in setting your mindful marketer priorities….

Today’s marketing leaders can recite the ABCs of social media: content marketing, revenue performance management, and branding. Yet when it comes to conversations with their C-suite peers, they often speak in another language.

In 2014, the Project Management Institute revealed that 44% of strategic initiatives are unsuccessful. Why? They discovered the main reason is a lack of organization alignment at around 58%. In other words, unsuccessful projects are not highly aligned to a company’s strategic goals.

If you are an executive responsible for driving growth, it’s tempting to be distracted by the myriad new marketing automation tools and marketing cloud applications at the expense of strategic priorities….