In the 21st century, marketing is in the midst of dramatic change - and the CMO role is changing with it. The marketing of the 20th century was defined by mass production and mass communication. It required an inside-out logic that began with the product and ended with the consumer. Today's marketing operates the other way around: it starts with people and their experiences and works its way backwards to products, technologies and processes. Marketing is about to hit the next level, and thus the chief marketing officer role needs to grow to match. This book profiles marketeers and CMOs from leading brands such as Banana Republic, Bayer, Generali, Gucci, Jagermeister, Katjes, Oatly, smart, Tony's Chocolonely, Unilever, Zalando and many more. What are their views, how do they perceive today's marketing and their role in it, and what skills will every CMO need to meet the challenges of marketing in the future?

Parallelwelten (parallel worlds) are worlds invisible to anyone not part of them. More and more, our reality is defined through digital products, which afford us infinitely more freedom than in the analogue past. But increased choice has also heightened our susceptibility to manipulation. Filter bubbles, fake news and alternative facts are just data that can be easily and cheaply manipulated. We now live in multiple realities that are increasingly losing touch with each other. Reality has been turned into bits. Or is it the other way around? The digital world increasingly defines, controls and governs the analogue world. Tech companies buy and sell the raw data of human experience. Our human behaviour is turned into data, which is processed into information and then manipulated and fed back into our information diet to control our behaviour. Data is the raw material, and information - not content - is king. Information even defines reality. This book investigates these parallel worlds from different angles: technological, corporate, scientific, cultural, economic and political. It doesn't view tech as an end in itself and something the rest of the world simply must adapt to. Instead, it asks how tech can solve real problems and make the world not a worse place, but a better one.

We live in a world that's constantly redesigned. Today's redesign is tomorrow's vintage look. But times of crisis rapidly change the picture. Suddenly, the whole world is in dire need of a proper redesign. From capitalism to communication, from work to supply chains, from cities to office space - it's hard to find an area of our lives that's not due for an overhaul. This is a challenge, but also a huge opportunity: to design a better world.