What Top Marketing Leaders are Thinking (and it is not NFTs or the Metaverse...)
Plus maybe a little boring! Having worked with leading CMOs directly and read some industry reports, it is clear that the things on the industry leaders' mind are a far cry from the new and shiny!
So I will start with the context of why I am writing on this subject this month.
I was at a conference last week and it was about digital futures and transformation on a regional level. There was lots of talk of the ‘Metaverse’, ‘Crypto’ and ‘Web 3.0’, maybe even Web 4.0 (??) - all developing upon the good old ‘Blockchain’.
Now… I am all for it and the direction of travel they are trying to achieve, but it is important to take a step back. One of the real tenets of marketing 101 is to know your audience, and focus on getting the product and positioning right before embarking on any fancy promotional innovations. Alas - this was a room of small businesses, from blind fitters to paper manufacturers. So although they were beguiled with the idea of fitting roman blinds in the metaverse, it felt like a far cry from the pertinent realities of short to medium term growth plans, such as the more mundane but effective business growth practices, such as Lead Gen, or setting up analytics and tracking properly.
Yes, perhaps aspire for a virtual NFT of your product, but perhaps get your website optimised first (as I always say - let’s get Web2.0 right!). As futurist and industry provocateur Tom Goodwin unsurprisingly (if you follow him you’d know!) responded to a Web3.0 aficionados the other day, ‘Web3.0 is a silly joke’ and ‘ignore that vague hype around it and just build on an internet that works amazingly and exists.’
It validates previous thoughts of true sustainable and perennial thinking, and the boring brilliant basics, then build on it with great creative work. As it turns out, top marketing chiefs know great work is about doing the little things well and consistently, underpinned by some big creative ideas.
The following 6 areas are the things that continually crop up, from both my own client experience. (where I either proxy as part time CMO or assist incumbent on consultancy basis) and from the swathes of reports that I have consumed (sources at end of article). Being customer journey obsessed, involved in everything, thinking about addressability, understanding the human over tech, return on investment & measurement, and sustainability.
Thought 1 : Being a part of the whole customer journey/experience
Per previous newsletters on the 4 Ps, the top and properly trained marketeers know the Promotion part is merely the tip of the iceberg. The whole product, experience, price and more denotes the best option. As Jasper Mertens, CMO of excellent pension fintech PensionBee states :
“Be a chameleon and stick your nose in the whole customer lifecycle because that’s where you belong.”
Basically, care for and be into every touchpoint with the customer or prospective customer, as that is where your brand wins or loses. Customer experience especially, as this is where the brands that acquisition and creative advertising works so hard to build, can undo themselves and crumble.
Thought 2 : The Chief Everything Officer
As well as the CMO becoming obsessed with Customer Service, the experience and all touchpoints, the role of Marketing is becoming an increasingly holistic discipline, with the best brands placing their CMO front and centre of the strategic impetus of the organisation. Oftentimes they see themselves as the Chief Customer Officer…
The CMO is obsessed with Finance, P&L and the company performance and with it commands a toolkit of being able to justify brand and performance spends, when only the latter shows immediate data on ROI, with better storytelling.
The CMO has to be both literate and entrenched in the data, and understand the way MI/BI and the analysts are set up to capture, store and present the data across both the marketing function and the entire business.
The CMO knows the employer brand is a key touchpoint of the business so being close to the people team and talent acquisition practices is also key.
Probably most importantly, the CMO is close to the Product team (or design/R&D) as they are at the coalface of understanding the customer wants, shaping market fit and ensuring the products serve the current and target customers. Again, your 4 Ps.
Mertens adds : “Marketers will increasingly work with product and design to shape the customer lifetime journey. We’re part of that journey, not an afterthought.”
Thought 3 : The data addressability issue
With the impending deprecation of the 3rd party cookie, marketeers are keen to look at the alternatives for targeting as they know the digital addressability of recent years will severely reduce if not cease. There is a scramble for 1st party data growth techniques, the use cases for CDPs are growing, and according to the AdExchanger report The Future of Advertising the interim solution of 3rd party data proliferates, although that feels unsustainable and costly.
According to the same report, ‘the overriding majority (81%) of publishers plan to adopt third-party identifiers following the deprecation of the third-party cookie’. However, ‘publishers which are building, or have built, first-party audiences are largely split on whether to make them available programmatically.’ In other words, utilising such data from other parties is not fool proof and could well lack the scale.
Thought 4 : Forget the tech - understand human emotions
Like the regional conference I mentioned earlier, stakeholders UK and globally are not immune to this. The shiny and new have proliferated boardroom conversation and LinkedIn rhetoric outside of marketing, oftentimes with CEOs wanting to shoehorn the new and shiny idea into some kind of plan, but to what end?
Whilst there’s consensus that keeping up with tech trends is important and critical to enable visualisation of data and correct measurement/planning, the principles of what drives customer behaviour should remain the north star.
Michelle Goodall, CMO of app and forum business Guild:
“Be genuinely intrigued and hungry to understand what motivates people to make certain decisions about their lives and work. Study people, their behaviours and rituals, social anthropology, community science - do it in parks, in cafes, at events, in your communities, through your data. Don’t dismiss blockchain and AI, but figure out how to map human behaviour to these technologies.”
Thought 5 : Continual need to prove ROI - but Measure what matters
The big challenge across the board, with leading CMOs commenting on it, is the continual need to showcase value and return. Internal stakeholder relationships are key. Pete Markey, the boots CMO and industry leading commentator often speaks of the CMO working closely with other functions like a true Everything officer, especially the CFO.
Also, just because you can measure it, does not mean it matters. The challenge of course is the digitisation of so many traditional channels that by design do not traditionally celebrate immediate return or sales. This is reaching the financial ears like wildfire and sadly the cross-departmental nascent knowledge of cross-channel planning can reduce it all to an ROI-chasing game.
When asked about this by The Media Leader when Channel 4 launched a programmatic advertising market for TV buying, I cited my concerns, as the mechanic of buying digital display ads may be the same in the background as buying addressable tv ads, but the purpose and output of these ads are very different and should be treated accordingly e.g. I would not measure clicks from a TV ad, but the reach!
Thought 6 : Sustainability - of both Marketing and the people
This deserves a whole other newsletter or article which will surely follow, but the challenge to many leaders is the need to support improvement of the great footprint of advertising, consider the ecosystems of buying and helping to decarbonise the media supply chain. Also internally - to create a culture of productivity through improved mental health and wellbeing. I have written lots about this in both embracing diversity of people and personality in the industry (i.e. how can you market to everyone if you yourselves are not everyone) and the need to be good to the core at product level onwards, not some vapid promotion.
Instead embrace media for good, but pick your battles. Maybe focus on the improvement of the product, create genuine sustainability. Or genuinely do good in the ad buy, like you can with online buying solutions like Good-Loop. Never the after-the-fact virtual signal. It is a challenge but the best marketers, per Thought 1, know that all touchpoints are the litmus test of sustainability, and not just a vapid content calendar piece.
To summarise the sentiment though - OPTIMISM
In the annual report by the Chartered Institute of marketing ‘The CMO 50’ reveals that marketing leaders are :
‘optimistic about the future, however they also understand there are many challenges and considerations ahead. Asked to give a score out of 100 for how optimistic they are about their own company or organisation, respondents gave an average score of 81 and only one individual gave a score below 50.’
Interestingly, Marketing leaders are more optimistic about their own organisations and the marketing sector than they are about the UK economy as a whole.
If you want to follow on more from these trends, I wrote a book at the start of 2021 called Back to Basics : 21 ways to increase marketing performance and success. Its original raison d’etre was to provide straight forward areas of marketing consideration and get the basics right. It turns out that it is proving perennial and a lot of the shares and principles last the test of time, and the CMOs quoted are of the same mind of almost 2 years ago. You can download your free copy here!
I close this by realising that it is not all doom and gloom despite the media’s notion of the world being on fire. Business is recovering, marketing is in good health, and by taking on the insights and lessons from the top CMOs, we can work across the different disciplines to ensure that the marketeer is the best friend of every organisation. Challenge accepted?
SA
PS. I hope you are getting a semblance of value out of this. If so, and you think any other marketeer or business owner would, feel free to share/forward this to them and encourage them to subscribe. Also, follow me on LinkedIn, Twitter or my company page. Thanks
Footnote : For more anecdotal feedback and conversation around some of this do get in touch, and all copies of reports cited are available from the publisher direct or myself on request.