Aug 16, 2012 | Branding, Innovation, Management, Marketing
The decades of growth up till a couple of years ago, and the recognition of the key nature of a robust marketing input to corporate success has left many organisations, particularly brand heavy consumer organisations with a marketing overhead problem as times change.
They have a structure that is often 5 layers from the CMO to the assistant brand manager, organised along brand lines, and recently supplemented with category analysts, social media experts, and other service roles. All this at a time when consumer brands are under huge threat from retailer owned brands, global marketing, fragile demand, the erosion of the ability to differentiate by the ubiquity of information, and agile low cost competitors.
Just getting rid of every third head makes little sense, all you do is lose corporate memory, so you need to reorganise to deliver productivity from the investment in marketing overhead, although inevitably there will be personnel losses. Three questions to consider:
- Is marketing activity aligned to corporate priorities?. Many times I have seen lower levels in marketing departments beavering away at projects that bear little resemblance to the strategic priorities held in the corner office.
- Are project portfolios run alongside brand initiatives to ensure that the silos that evolve when brand groups are relatively autonomous are removed?.
- Have you made the hard choices about what projects will proceed, and which will be relegated to the car-park?. This is sometimes very hard, but is a crucial circuit breaker for innovation, with the caveat that those projects left are appropriately resourced.
This is not easy stuff, and most fail the test, which results in sub-optimal resource allocation decisions.
Aug 6, 2012 | Management, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
The term exponential is routinely used in engineering, maths, and the sciences, meaning, in lay terms, that the rate of increase in the derivative of a factor increases faster than the increase in the factor itself. “Gobbldy Gook” to most marketers.
Moore’s law is perhaps the most widely known use of this equation, but is only one of many.
Futurist Ray Kurzweil cited many others in a fascinating TED talk a few years ago, in which he points out that exponential growth is a common feature of technological growth, we just have to recognise it when we see it.
Mitch Joels great blog got me thinking.
The growth of complexity in the practice of marketing; new channels, social media, blogs enabling anyone to be a published writer, 100 TV channels at the end of a remote, new industries, the emerging models of collaboration, and all the rest are not linear growth, they are growing by leveraging the principals of exponential maths. The first one is hard, and takes years, the next is much easier and doesn’t take much time, then there is an explosion.
The way we generally think about marketing, and certainly the way the senior management of most large corporations think about it, is still in the linear mode, when the explosion in the opportunities presented by marketing to communicate and connect is an exponential change.
Competitive advantage will accrue to those enterprises that are capable of recognising that marketing into the future will operate in a different dimension if you like, to the C20 notion of accountability dominated by financial measures. Measuring performance by a P&L and Balance sheet mentality that counts what has happened, rather than assessing what will happen, and recognising the opportunities presented by exponential marketing will be leaving huge opportunities on the table.
Aug 1, 2012 | Collaboration, Strategy
Ever thought “how do we get anything done with all these meetings”?
It is a paradox, as the evolving recognition that meetings are essential to successful collaborative activity, and the growth of collaboration as a strategy grows rapidly, so does the propensity for meetings.
However, many meetings are just an excuse for idle people to fill up the time available, and make it seem worthwhile and useful.
Meetings are not a substitute for thinking, they are one of two things:
- A forum to communicate face to face when the issue is sufficiently complicated, or important that other forms of communication are insufficient in their depth of engagement to be as effective, so the meeting its worth the cost, or,
- A forum to throw away the shackles of hierarchy, functional silos, and culture, and address a problem/opportunity as a 5 year old would, with delight, and no inhibitions.
All other reasons for a meeting are just an excuse, and beware of the evils of “groupthink”.
Which of these two did your last meeting fall into?
How is your organisation managing the paradox?
Jul 27, 2012 | Customers, Marketing
A Verb, a word that is something that describes an action, like work, run, achieve, but often, unfortunately when marketing is the topic of conversation, words such as complicate, confuse, dodge, unmeasurable, and such can be added.
Seth Godin sees marketing as a series of concentric circles, the closer to the centre, the more objective and product benefit focused the language becomes, and it is a very simple, but insightful way of looking at it.
Successful businesses in the future will see the practice of marketing take on a few common characteristics that have the action aspects of the verb:
- Measurable
- Accountable
- Customer centric
- Transparent
- Motivating
- Innovative
- All encompassing
- Engaged
What have I missed?
Jul 25, 2012 | Marketing, Sales, Social Media
Sales people are used to being measured by hard metrics, and management is very used to imposing and managing these metrics, and marketers are more inclined now than just a while ago, to have quantifiable measures.
Therein lies one of the challenges of social media.
To varying degrees, SM is not a great sales tool, but it is a great tool to build engagement, and engagement leads to sales, eventually, and amongst other outcomes. It can take the place of the face to face selling, and potentially much of the role of traditional advertising.
When on the web, searching for information, peoples bullshit meter is working, so their receptiveness to advertising may be no greater than in a normal mass media environment, the huge difference being the ability of web advertising to target information at those looking for it. However, on social media, I contend that the bullshit meter is at a lower level, perhaps turned off, as they are seeking to engage, not just seeking information, so information accepted takes on some of the characteristics of endorsement.
