5 signs your marketing is old-school
If COVID-19 didn’t bring any new change, it certainly accelerated previously existing behavioral shifts and cultural trends. Which makes now a great moment for CMOs to step back and examine how their organizations keep up with time. Everything from marketing strategy to capabilities and culture must be radically modernized, when the following outdated behaviors and philosophies are observed:
#1: Anchoring in ‘stores’ and ‘websites’
The future of marketing is to meet consumers’ needs where they are, not burden them with searching for solutions. Modern marketers already know how to be immediately present with a compelling promise when and where a consumer need arises. Similarly, forward-thinking product teams are creating ubiquitous, distributed access to their product- or service experience, no matter where the consumer is or which device they’re interacting with.
This does not imply that websites and apps will disappear any time soon. But modern, consumer-centric marketers will consider joint ventures to integrate and embed their experiences inside more dominant tech platforms — even if it requires data sharing. As commerce continues to blend with communication and entertainment, the number of shopping destinations multiplies: Amazon and Walmart will increasingly see competition from Instagram, WhatsApp, as well as YouTube, TikTok, and Netflix. Correspondingly, Alexa will need to start dealing with Android, iOS (and their home OS equivalents) as direct competitors for share of wallet, as they create new ways for brands to sell DTC.
Old-school, self-centric marketers will try to preserve and control a centralized offering, expect consumers to work hard finding it, and then spend a significant amount of marketing dollars to alleviate that pain. Old-school marketers also tend to ignore that marketing’s 4 Ps include both ‘product’ and ‘place’, giving them full permission to distribute not only the marketing messaging, but also the experience itself. It only requires them to overcome the fears of ceding sole proprietorship of data, externally partnering, and investing in the physical and digital logistics of the future.
#2: Considering ‘growth marketing’ a thing
Unlike most other professions, marketing seems to go through an identity crisis with repeated periods of self-mutilation. Almost, as if an inexperienced brand manager was tasked with creating a brand architecture for the profession, randomly proliferating (siloed) sub-disciplines like “digital marketing”, “social marketing” or “growth marketing”.
‘Digital’ is of course nothing but a delivery format, and an integral part of today’s marketing reality. There’s hardly any marketing channel without a digital element to it, and so, saying "digital marketing” is like saying “Color Television” — it makes people who say it look old. ‘Social’ is merely part of a standard marketing mix: an operational channel (like it is for customer support, too). Because real people don’t live in channels, and just like there was never a TV marketing team, there really should not be a social marketing team either. But “growth marketing” really takes the cake, hilariously implying that some other type of marketing (which one???) is NOT focused on driving growth.
It was in the last century, when marketing departments were treated as cost centers. Somehow believed to be necessary for business, but not expected — and often unable — to provide any numerical evidence of contribution to the bottom line. In today’s world of shrinking marketing budgets, every marketing activity must have empirical (modeled or observed) contribution to KPIs, and an ROI associated with it. Modern (trained) marketers always deliver measurable growth — whether they run paid search campaigns, programmatic display, TV ads, events. Or all of that combined, in a single, coherent and connected marketing approach.
#3: Running a ‘brand campaign’
Old-school marketing managers often refer to a ‘brand campaign’ when their communication message focuses on a higher-level proposition, or the brand promise itself. Even worse, sometimes a ‘brand campaign’ is seen as the equivalent of broadcast advertising such as TV, print, radio, out-of-home billboards, cinema and other ATL media vehicles. The phrase bewilderingly insinuates that other campaigns do not necessarily need to build the brand… or somehow aren’t directly about the brand?
Of course, ‘brand’ isn’t a sub-discipline of marketing, a bunch of “classic” media channels, or some other relic of the Mad Men era. ‘Brand’ is the sum of all perceptions about a company, product or service. Which includes not only all forms of marketing, but also the product- or service experience itself, customer support, public relations, and any other stakeholder-facing output from corporate functions — verbal or non-verbal, conscious or unconscious. Yes, even a job description or a press release. Any and all of that will inevitably and invariably drive brand perceptions.
Modern marketers build their brand up and down the funnel, across the entire customer journey, and throughout product life cycle. No matter whether they communicate a high-level brand promise through an omni-channel marketing campaign, a product feature with a UX tool tip, or a price promotion via text message: modern marketers always build their brand while they build their business. There’s no such thing as a ‘brand campaign’.
#4: Targeting a ‘marketing persona’
The “Soccer Mom Suzy is a 55 years old regional marketing leader, married with two kids, living in an upper middle-class Californian suburb…” kind of marketing persona is unfortunately still alive and kicking in old-school marketing departments. Back in the early 2000s, a demographic segment description was an accepted and essential tool for buying TV and radio ad space. Today, even with complementary attitudinal or behavioral attributes, this wouldn’t enable effective marketing execution.
Of course, media agencies will still take your dollars and do their very best. But the tools of the trade have changed. Modern marketing leverages ML-powered targeting engines, freeing them from stereotyping customers based on rudimentary socio-demographic data, and making assumptions about messaging receptivity and product- or service affinity. Modern targeting algorithms can process thousands of consideration- and transaction drivers (and barriers!), as well as contextual data like competitive pricing, location, time of day, device, application, transaction history, browsing history, calendar entries, cultural events, and more.
With sufficient opportunity to learn, predictive modeling will help marketing serve contextually relevant, personalized and effective advertising. Real-time pattern recognition helps identify both transaction propensities and -occasions. And dynamic offer management will compile the right creative (message, incentive etc.), and serve it at the right time, through the right channels, to the right target. Modern marketers understand that context and occasion shapes their target, and that their target segments are surprisingly diverse. Nothing like a persona at all.
#5: Trying to ‘have a conversation’ with your consumers
Yes, it is sub-ideal to talk at people, bombarding them with countless outbound marketing executions. And yes, it would be more desirable for a brand to converse with people, and engage around a relevant and timely subject.
However, conversations are between people, and brands aren’t people (except for celebrities). Conversations also require an exchange of ideas, opinions or sentiments — of which most brands have none (nor have their bots). The only conversations people generally agree to have with brands are the ones that add immediate, tangible value: issue resolution with customer support; an in-person consultation on location, via phone, or chat; a job interview; or the earnings call Q&A. NET: Having conversations with customers is a time-consuming, high-touch, hard to scale, hard to monetize, and thus exorbitantly expensive thing to do. Something that last fit the marketing bill in the 1960s or so.
Modern marketers will earn consumer engagement — not by arrogantly presuming to participate in conversations, but by humbly serving as a catalyst for conversations. Modern marketers will co-create together with real people, feature them and their stories prominently, and involve them directly with UGC-based activations. Modern marketers will establish creative platforms and experiential ecosystems to provide space, spark and sustenance for real people to have conversations among each other, and to sponsor related activism. But most importantly: Modern marketers will continuously iterate to drive contextual relevance, efficiently harvest consumer engagement, and monetize it effectively. Modern marketers may also enlist their CEO for a Reddit town hall, and prompt an actual exchange of ideas with consumers. But they’d see it for what it is: a PR stunt, not a scalable marketing lever.
In summary, modern marketing (a.o.) …
…distributes not only marketing, but also the experience.
…drives business growth with all forms of marketing.
…builds brand equity across the entire customer journey.
…targets context and transaction occasions, not a persona.
…creates scalable ecosystems to monetize engagement.
Ironically, none of the above prevents a modern marketer from mailing a physical brochure, advertising in the yellow pages, or broadcasting a radio spot to build their business in highly effective ways. As long as they know their audience.
