Our Latest Thinking on Marketing and Sales

As personalized customer experiences become the norm, marketing and sales functions face critical challenges and opportunities. Explore BCG’s latest thought leadership on marketing and sales to learn what the future of digital marketing means for your business.

Featured Insights

Capturing Mind Share with Precision Branding

Read the Article

Get Your B2B Sales Team Ready for the Power of Generative AI

Read the Article

Smarter Retailer Promotions for a Saturated Market

Read the Article

The Unified Theory of Pricing

Read the Article

Sales and Channels

Changing the Topic of the Direct-to-Consumer Conversation

Many companies are using the DTC model to engage with consumers, rather than sell to them. It’s proving to be a more cost-effective way to scale.

Auto Distributors and Importers Need to Gear Up for the Future

The sales model, retail infrastructure, and aftersales business are all under pressure. But by acting in five key areas, auto distributors and importers can address challenges and seize new opportunities.

Driving Success in Car Subscriptions

The subscription business is no slam dunk, but a few companies have figured it out. Here are three things providers must do to win.

What an Accelerating Secondhand Market Means for Fashion Brands and Retailers

Combined BCG and Vestiaire Collective research sheds light on the trends that matter most to consumers.

Highlights from the 2023 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity

With Precision Marketing, Brands Can Personalize Their Media Buys

Identifying all the touchpoints for consumers is challenging, but precision branding can help companies personalize approaches even to a broad and diverse audience. BCG's Javier Pérez Moiño explains.
Generative AI Will Spark a Marketing Renaissance

The impact of GenAI is still reverberating throughout the marketing world, but BCG's Nicole Meissner is confident that the technology will unleash a new era of creativity.
Competing with Marketers Using AI

AI is no doubt reshaping the world of work. But sometimes, it is doing so in unexpected ways. Google’s Marie Gulin-Merle joins BCG’s David Ratajczak to discuss what the technology means for marketing. One outcome? Marketers who are now able to focus on marketing.
A Bright Future for Marketing

How are new technologies changing the relationship between brands and consumers? Akbar Hamid, founder of the creative consultancy 5th Column, shares his reflections on the changing landscape of marketing—and the opportunities that still lie ahead.
Expanding and Diversifying Your Audience

Marissa Solis, Head of the Global Brand and Marketing for the NFL, gives her insights on how to produce content that engages an audience that’s becoming younger and more diverse than ever.
How to Approach Marketing Investment with Precision Branding

With marketing budgets under pressure in a challenging business environment, CMOs can use precision branding to add value where it matters. Managing Director and Senior Partner David Ratajczak explains this important concept.
Collaboration Across the C-Suite

CMOs can’t afford to work in a silo. They need buy-in from the rest of the C-suite. Marissa Jarratt, head of marketing and sustainability at 7-Eleven, talks with BCG's Lauren Weiner about the power of collaboration.
Pace and Purpose

BCG X's Amaryllis Liampoti joins Pandora’s Jesper Damsgaard to talk through what will change and what should stay the same for brands navigating changing customer expectations and powerful new technologies.

Explore more insights from Cannes Lions

B2B Marketing

Resilient Pricing for an Uncertain World

The longer the threats of inflation, recession, and disruption persist, the more B2B companies will need to use a wider range of pricing options to maintain strong financial performance.

Tech Is Cooling Off. B2B SaaS Is Not.

The B2B software-as-a-service model segment is growing about ten times faster than any other. Here’s a playbook to continue the growth trajectory.

Your Software Customers Need a Tailored Industry Approach

Rising customer expectations mean software companies are increasingly “verticalizing” their products, marketing, sales, and ecosystems—adapting them to distinct industry needs and use cases.

B2B Marketing in a World Without Cookies

Faced with stricter government regulation of third-party customer data sharing and beefed-up privacy features in new operating systems and browsers, digital marketers must rethink their data strategies.

Game Changer: BCG’s New Strategic Pricing Book

It’s time to look at pricing decisions in a new light. Game Changer: How Strategic Pricing Shapes Businesses, Markets, and Society not only exposes the flaws in current pricing models, it also explains how the right pricing strategy can change the trajectory of your business, your industry, and in many cases, society as well.

Learn more

Digital Marketing and Privacy

How CMOs Are Succeeding with Generative AI

GenAI technology is already enhancing marketing efficiency and productivity. Managed responsibly, it can positively reshape the role and influence of the CMO.

Executive Perspectives: The Future of Sales and Marketing Is Here

Thanks in no small part to the pandemic, people are today spending more time—and more money—online than ever before. And we’re expecting the quality of our experiences to grow alongside our engagement. The future of sales and marketing requires bold new approaches and refreshed strategies.

Rethinking E-Commerce for the Era of the Metaverse

The evolution of the metaverse could be a disruptive event requiring dramatic changes to the way you do business. Is your company ready?

Agile Marketing for a Digital World

When marketers face increased pressure and scrutiny, they can improve quality and increase efficiency by adopting the agile principles that have made product development efforts successful.

CMOs Must Act Now—and Plan for Later

Resilience requires CMOs to be nimble—investing in capabilities that can help their companies win now and those that will create competitive advantage over the next three to five years.

Marketing Organization

Making Agile Work in Marketing

Agile principles can enhance the performance of marketing organizations––as long as companies apply the principles flexibly rather than adhering strictly to agile methodology.

Better Measurement, Better Biopharma Marketing

More patient and customer touch points and varied purchase pathways are rendering traditional marketing and sales measurement obsolete. Companies need a new, multipronged strategy to generate returns.

Don’t Cut Your Brand-Marketing Budget. Rethink It.

Reframing brand spending as a vital long-term investment helps companies build the resilience they will need when a downturn hits.

Solving the Build-or-Buy Equation in Marketing

Should you continue to outsource your marketing capabilities or bring them in-house? As leading organizations have discovered, it doesn’t have to be either/or.

Inflation

Explore BCG’s insights on how to navigate today’s inflationary environment while building competitive advantage for tomorrow.

Leading Online Shoppers to the Finish Line

BCG and Shopify looked at 1 billion data points across more than 220,000 sites to determine the best ways for sellers to optimize their e-commerce conversion rates.

Overcoming the Eight Barriers to Making Green Mainstream

To nudge consumers toward more sustainable products, companies need to gain a deep understanding of consumer needs and motivations, and then devise strategies to change buying patterns.

Don’t Overlook Your Mature Consumers

The 50- to 70-year-old demographic is a growing, multitrillion-dollar global market—but people in it are hard to engage with normal marketing. Here’s how to reach them.

Steering Consumers to Greener Travel and Tourism Choices

Taking green mainstream is all about understanding consumers and how they make choices—and then creating and communicating sustainable alternatives.

Exclusive Download

The Future Is Mainstream Green: Introducing a New Growth Strategy

This is a guide for chief marketing officers to take green beyond niche and into the mainstream. Mainstream Green is about driving sustainable choices by all consumers, not just those who are moved by sustainable claims. To reach our collective climate ambitions, we need massive consumer change—a widespread embrace of new products, new services, new marketing, and new behaviors.

CMOs are well positioned to drive customer-centric change because they understand consumers’ concerns and aspirations and have a platform within companies to make change happen. By following this guide, CMOs can take practical steps toward helping us get to Mainstream Green.

Customer Centricity

What Will AI Do for Customer Experience?

A revolution is underway in personalized shopping, customer service, and marketing. Companies that successfully deploy generative AI can set themselves apart from the competition.

Touchpoints and the Revolution in Omnichannel

Touchpoint-centric engagement could unleash massive value for customers and businesses. Taking just a few key steps will help companies reap the rewards.

Building Customer Experience for the Future

How can businesses adapt to fast-evolving expectations? Here are the capabilities companies need to thrive.

The Declining Relevance of Humans in Delivering What Customers Want

Retailers and service providers should rethink where and how they deploy their sales agents in light of data that shows current approaches aren’t delivering the experiences consumers want.

BCG on Marketing, Sales, and Pricing

Customer expectations are rising—are you ready to meet them? Explore our latest insights and thought leadership.

View and follow our showcase page on LinkedIn

Personalization

How Bank CMOs Can Do More with Less

A laser-like focus on transforming marketing for efficiency can be the elusive key to unlocking effectiveness and growth as well.

What’s Possible: GenAI and Customer Service

Customer interactions with brands will soon be transformed by a new breed of conversational chatbots offering no wait times, 24/7 access, and 100% recall of support information—at cost savings up to 80 percent.

Loyalty Programs Need Next-Generation Design

Customers today want more from loyalty programs than just discounts and points. Companies are adopting new ways to engage customers through personalization, subscriptions, communities, and partner ecosystems.

Social Commerce Is Remaking Online Shopping

If done right, this increasingly popular offshoot of e-commerce can benefit consumers, tech platforms, and brands. Here are four social-commerce archetypes companies can follow.