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Re: Focus

How are professional services marketing leaders responding to market uncertainty?
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InsightsRe: Focus | CMO white paper

The world is enduring a period of profound change and transformation. Post-pandemic uncertainty, economic headwinds, and global geopolitical instability have all left their mark. As businesses come to terms with a new normal, professional services firms need to keep pace.

For this white paper, we spoke to global marketing leaders from some of the world's top professional services firms. Through in-depth interviews, we sought to understand how an uncertain market is shaping their thinking, and how they plan to stay focused on what really matters amidst shifting cultural and economic sands.

What did we learn?

We identified four key trends from our conversations with marketing leaders:

The great refocus

Faced with uncertainty on all fronts, marketers are refocusing their efforts and thinking more deeply about what really matters.

Marketing, fast and slow

Marketing leaders are walking a strategic tightrope, defending brand against pressure to prioritise short-term interests while simultaneously having to adopt an agile, responsive approach.

Building tighter bonds

Marketing functions are forming closer connections with practitioners, business development units, and the wider firm, aligning their activities and centring their focus on the needs of the client.

The new talent imperative

Gone is the age of the marketing generalist, at least at the mid-level—instead, specialised skill sets must be integrated horizontally to maximise efficiency and agility.

Who is this report for?

If you're a current or aspiring strategy, marketing, or BD leader in professional services and you want to understand how the best minds in the industry are thinking right now, this report is for you.

 

What can you expect?

At Source, we want to make sense of the now and the next. The world of work is changing, and professional services firms play a huge part in driving that change. In emphasizing the need for discernment, clarity, and collaboration, the marketing leaders we spoke to gave us a glimpse of the future, one we sought to relay to our readers in this white paper.

Changeable markets can be a time of fertility, innovation, and creativity—but you have to let go of the business-as-usual mindset. The client paradigm has changed, and marketing won't resonate if it doesn't reflect this new context.
Antonia Wade, Global CMO, PwC