Curious behaviours in modern marketing teams

Creativebrief research reveals major opportunity for brands to drive marketing impact through cultivating internal cultures of curiosity  

Senior marketing leaders unanimously agree that curiosity is an essential trait for successful marketers, yet challenging modern-day market conditions are preventing progress in driving truly curious cultures within brands and their teams.

Given the body of evidence of the value of building marketing cultures around curious behaviours (from institutions such as Harvard Business Review and McKinsey), a new report contends that marketing leadership teams must work harder to find solutions.

The survey, conducted by Creativebrief, asked 50+ CMOs and marketing directors at brands (including Tommy Hilfiger, Bacardi, Sainsbury’s and Adidas) about their beliefs around curiosity and associated behaviours within their own marketing teams. 

The research reveals that 100% of senior marketers: 

• consider ‘curiosity’ to be an essential trait for successful marketers
• agree that curious marketing cultures lead to higher performing teams
• believe that curious cultures lead to more creative, innovative and effective marketing output 

And 83% consider that cultivating a more curious marketing culture is a priority for them and their organisations in the next 12-24 months.

Yet, despite this collective opinion on the importance of curiosity:

• Less than a third of marketing leaders consider themselves to be actively encouraging curious behaviours at all levels of their team
• Only 22% of marketing teams are drawing inspiration from outside their brands regularly 
• Only 20% of marketing leaders are actively creating time and space for curiosity and learning outside of their own sectors
• Only 17% of senior marketers are actively rewarding curiosity as a behaviour trait

“The results of this research lay bare the challenges facing marketing leaders today. A lack of time and resource, competing organisational priorities and individual personal motivation are cited as the key barriers to enabling the conditions for curiosity to thrive – but marketing leadership teams must now begin to find a solution.

Failure to change this is a non-negotiable in a squeezed economic environment where all brands are under pressure to do more with less. In this climate every marketer is expected to act smart, innovate and out-think (rather than out-spend) the competition. Curious cultures will be a key driver of any team’s ability to execute this.

Senior marketing figureheads have a major opportunity now to drive competitive advantage through re-instilling the importance of curiosity into their teams at all levels – and ensuring they are able to recognise what effective commercial creativity looks like today and deliver it for their own brands. 

CMOs also have a responsibility in this regard to ensure that they don’t oversee an era in which marketing functions retrench towards becoming more parochial and inward looking than ever before.

This must be a re-set bred from the very top. Anything less would be a failure of leadership that our industry will suffer keenly for generations to come.” 

You can download the full report which surveys over 50 brand CMOs and marketing directors here.