After decades of trying to fill their brands’ proverbial leaky buckets — continually flooding them with new customers won through acquisition dollars instead of plugging the holes with retention spend — marketers are finally turning the tide.

According to a recent Gartner survey of CMOs, marketing leaders are now allocating two-thirds of their budgets toward customer retention and growth initiatives in an effort to boost lifetime value. That’s a drastic swing from last year, when the results of a CMO survey conducted by my employer revealed marketers were still spending three-quarters of marketing budgets on acquisition.

Why the sudden change? Because the disruptive wave of Amazon, the most valuable brand on the planet according to the Brand Finance Group, continues to swell, leaving a demanding, fickle, experience-driven marketplace in its wake.

By leveraging every bit of customer data to innovate and deliver more valuable offerings, Amazon continually entices shoppers to come back and spend more — and brands that haven’t adopted customer-centric strategies are barely keeping afloat.

[Read the full article on MarTech Today.]

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