The 2020 Benchmark: Myth or Reality?

Perhaps it is because it has a nice ring to it, but 2020 has long been a favorite benchmark when it comes to judging the future of marketing. For years, articles and editorials have been developed around the idea that by 2020, marketers will have the answers and will be prepared to meet any and all challenges in supporting their customer needs.

The truth is, 2020 is less than a year away and we still find ourselves in a period of significant change. Digital transformation has given way to the development of the Intelligent Enterprise. With this, relevant and trusted data, from both internal and external sources, has become and will continue to be a critical resource in driving business outcomes.

Knowing what we know now, I took a look back at three marketing predictions to assess how close the analysts and experts were over in their forecast for 2020. Here’s what I found:

Prediction: the traditional product development lifecycle will vanish (circa 2015)

According to Fast Company’s roundup of 2020 predictions, by next year we will see the death of the traditional product development lifecycle. Across industries, given that the speed of design and go-to-market has increased, product and marketing campaign development will be much more aligned. Marketers’ ability to inform product development with unique customer insight will be game changing.

This prediction was spot on. We did, however, get there much sooner than 2020. Within enterprise technology, as customers move from on-premise to cloud offerings, the product lifecycle has seen significant changes. Software vendors have to ensure customers see continuous value, otherwise they will not use the solution and ultimately, will not renew their subscription. The marketer’s job has expanded from top of the funnel awareness and demand through the sales cycle and finally to adoption, renewal and advocacy. This responsibility beyond the initial sale requires knowledge of both the product and the customer themselves. The modern marketer is deeply involved throughout the customer journey, to make sure that customer needs are met.

Prediction: the enterprise workload moves to the cloud (circa 2017)

A survey conducted by LogicMonitor found that by 2020, 83 percent of enterprise workloads will be in the cloud. Furthermore, they projected that 41 percent of enterprise workloads will run on public cloud platforms, and an additional 22 percent will be running on hybrid cloud platforms.

At SAP, revenue from cloud subscriptions now exceeds software license revenue – a shift that happened faster than expected. This growth has created massive opportunities in how we build scalable pricing models, and products that best suit specific customer needs. So, now that the cloud has become so prolific, where do we go from here? Integration across applications, a standardized data management layer, embedded technologies like analytics, ML will become the norm. Customers will demand both best-in-breed and best-in-suite and vendors that can provide this kind of end-to-end landscape will have a competitive advantage.

Prediction: AI will create more jobs than it eliminates (circa 2017)

Findings by Gartner claimed that 2020 will be a pivotal year in AI-related employment dynamics. In fact, as opposed to the alarmist views of some experts, Gartner saw artificial intelligence as a positive job motivator. They acknowledged that it would vary by industry; healthcare, the public sector and education will see continuously growing job demand while manufacturing will be hit the hardest. Starting in 2020, AI-related job creation will cross into positive territory, reaching two million net-new jobs in 2025.

This prediction is unique among the three as organizations won’t quite have mastered AI by 2020.

There is no doubt that data is completely changing the way we live and work – playing a key role in the successful deployment of practical AI applications. But AI by itself is meaningless without the human element. AI needs human oversight, matching intelligent solutions with nuanced and contextual understanding of customers. Furthermore, there’s the caveat of the marketing skills gap. Marketers are still mastering data interpretation. Once marketers are able to determine the difference between quality and noise and becomes a standard job requirement, then they’ll be able to turn those insights into AI action.

Did you have any marketing predictions for 2020 that have already come true? Any that are still far off? Let me know in the comments or share with me on Twitter @alison_biggan.