Dear CEOs: Marketing is a Science. If you don’t believe in it, stop spending money on it.
Warning:?This is a rant
SCIENTISTS FAIL EVERY?DAY.?Failure is an essential?and inescapable part of scientific research. It’s baked right into the scientific method: observe, measure, hypothesize, and then test. Of course, that hypothesis is often wrong. When it is, scientists go back, observe more, get new measurements, come up with a new hypothesis, and test again. And again.??
---Wired
Marie Curie didn’t get it right after her first year.?Nor her second year.?It took her?over three years?to isolate one-tenth of a gram of pure radium chloride.?That was just the beginning.?Her discovery led to a Nobel prize and profitable, life-saving technologies.?So, it is nearly impossible to expect exceptional revenue performance from a new strategy or campaign in a CMO’s first year or even a second.
If organizations have acceptable levels of failure, flaws, delays, and everything in between for other divisions, why is it different for Marketing??Marketers are exhausted by the double standard and the infliction of everyone’s frequently unsolicited opinion.?
CMOs don’t tell their CFO what tax strategies they should be using.?They don’t tell their COO where to source materials.?Nor do they tell the CHRO how to hire candidates.?But everyone seems to be an expert on marketing.?We hear comments like “the boss’s wife didn’t like the colors” or “someone’s friend thinks the wording is wrong.”?Did she study color theory in design school??Has the friend been a professional writer for years??Subjective comments like this do not lead to revenue generating marketing.
Yes, I am pissed.?After 30 years in this business, I’ve seen the marketer’s role reduced further and further to an operational function.?Would you let AI decide who you want to hire as your Chief Legal Officer??Hell no.?To think that data can out-empathize the human condition is absurd.?And if everyone is using data or AI exclusively to drive marketing strategy and design, all you get is crap that looks like everyone else’s crap.?
Don’t get me wrong, I love research and I love using data to provide unbiased direction.?I believe in the scientific process.?And marketing is a science.?It requires the same latitude for failure and course correction from lessons learned.
What can you do to set your CMO up for revenue success?
1.????Include the CMO on your executive team and in your executive decisions.?
Marketing represent the voice of the customer.?If that voice isn’t in the boardroom, you’re making decisions skewed toward the voice of the investor or the executive team’s functional biases.?Most organizations claim “customers first” but the first step to that is knowing what they want and need.?That sits with your CMO.
2.????Merge the organizational strategy with the brand strategy.?
If you aren’t doing that, you’re already set up to fail.?Siloed strategies frequently compete.?A budget cut that may look impressive on a quarterly report may damage your brand experience and longer-term revenue.?If you look at the “corporate pillars” of an organization, often they do not align with the brand strategy.?This causes internal strife as different groups work against each other by working toward fulfilling one mandate or the other.
3.????Share financials with your CMO.?
There are many companies that say financial information is too confidential to be shared with marketers.?Again, absurd.?If you expect your CMO’s work to generate revenue or value, they need exposure to the full economic picture.
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To think your CMO does not have the capacity to keep financials private, but expecting them to deliver on revenue, is unrealistic and will lead to underperformance.
4.????Demand Brand/Reputational KPIs from each division.
First, it is important to level-set that brand is reputation.?Reputation is brand.?Customer experience is also brand.?The industry created distinctions to differentiate themselves in the types of services offered to build or manage brand.?Annual reports always mention reputational risk.?That’s brand risk.?Therefore, it requires organizational effort.
Each division has reciprocal KPIs except for Marketing; the lead on brand/reputation.?Financial, operational, and HR KPIs are established for each division but what about your reputational KPIs???Lululemon sourced a cheaper fabric for a pair of pants that ended up costing them an estimated $67-million in sales (Source:?2015 Digital Business Discourse).?In addition, there were costs associated with damage control including a lawsuit and the product recall.
Their stock price flatlined for the following 6 years as other competitors entered the market with comparable quality.?Before the see-through debacle, Lululemon was the dominant name in every yoga studio.
Did Lululemon’s Operations consider the reputational impact of changing suppliers to squeeze out a few more cents of profitability for their financial KPI??Likely not.?If your entire organization isn’t thinking about “how will this look to our customers”:
5.????Research before you invest in brand/reputation.?
KYC—Know your customer and KYP—know your prospects.?Conduct a deep dive to understand what they think is important and what they think is compelling about your product or service EXPERIENCE.?It is more than just awareness, purchase intent, and NPS metrics. Those are diagnostics and not a true reflection of what revenue you can generate from the right brand and value proposition.
6.????Show up.?
When invited to high-level brand strategy initiatives, be there.?It is better to have CEOs participate, share their points-of-view, and buy-in to the approach to avoid lunch bag let down when the CMO deploys an initiative.?By then, the fare has been paid and the bus has left the station.
For people that know me, they know I rant because I genuinely care.?When I stop ranting, that’s when there is a problem.?So I’m going to keep on ranting and providing suggestions to be part of Marketing and Brand’s rebranding.?Feel free to join me on this journey.?To this end, I will no longer be using the term Marketing.?It is Marketing Science.