Are your clients feeling down in the dumps?
Reports indicate a sourness in the land of titans.
Fear of Uncertainty Is Bad for Business
In an analysis of online content from more than 58,000 chief executive and chief marketing officers, the overall confidence among global CEOs and CMOs is down more than 20 percent, with the most significant drops in the United States (51 percent) and China (21 percent). Japan bucked the trend, moving from last to first in the Confidence Index, with a rise of 74 percent.
“High levels of uncertainty globally, including talk of trade wars between the United States and China, have not helped assuage the fears of business leaders, and our research shows that global trade agreements and tariffs are undermining confidence,” said Roger Hurni, chairman of the Worldcom Public Relations Group.
This year, Worldcom engaged Advanced Symbolics Inc., a market research firm that uses artificial intelligence to track and interpret publicly available social media content. Erin Kelly, chief executive officer of Advanced Symbolics, said, “Our AI tracked a sample of nearly 60,000 business leaders from 15 different countries – a big increase from previous years.”
What Keeps Leaders Up at Night
In 2018, CEOs were most concerned with reaching customers, but respondents in the 2019 research report are most concerned with influencers, which grew 160 percent from 2018 to 2019, followed by customers and employees.
Another issue CEOs and CMOs are managing is the retention of current employees. Leaders have low confidence in their abilities to retain talent. Firms in the United Kingdom and the United States rank last and second-to-last respectively, in their confidence to retain employees.
“Just like last year, what is keeping CEOs up at night is retaining top talent. This year they also want to ensure employees have the right skills in an evolving and dynamic workplace,” said Hurni.
In other words, people are at the core of the c-suite’s concerns. Businesses need people to help promote the brand, and they need people who want to work for the company. But people, in many cases, have other plans.
