The End of Marketing

My fellow marketers, I hate to break the news to you but you are going extinct.  Be it a analyst, brand manager, product manager or PR person, your days are numbered.  The role of traditional marketing is going away to be replaced with something that has far more impact and creates a far better customer experience.  However that doesn’t mean you personally are going extinct.  The role of marketing is changing to actually live up to the promise of marketing but that will require changes.

This isn’t another hit piece from someone who has never worked in marketing, you know the ones, some tech guy telling you why marketing is a waste of time, when they have never spent any time doing marketing.  I have a background in marketing with work experience and degrees in marketing, for most of my career I have called myself a marketer.  I loved marketing, even with all the condescending remarks from other teams that marketing was just sales people good at coloring inside the lines.  I always knew the promise of marketing to create a compelling experience for customers was still a good goal to go for, we just had the wrong tools.  Since the dotcom bubble, it has been a bit obvious that the role of marketing and what is called marketing, would change.  About 5 years ago, all the right tools were in place to make that really happen in a meaningful way.  Now, many companies are starting to notice this need to change, some are even changing the name of marketing and the CMO role to Chief Customer Experience Officer.  The fact of the matter is, traditional marketing is over.  Even though traditional marketing is going away, that doesn’t mean the tool skills and tools are perfect without you.

Traditional marketing has always been a one way conversation for the most part.  Yes there are things like market research, focus groups, interviews and so on, however those were just sampling a very small set of customers.  Then companies would use brand managers or merchants to define the brand, image and culture for the masses.  What it created was uniformity, sameness, following the crowd and expecting people to be happy with it.  Maybe that worked in the 80’s but we are 30 years past the 80’s, so why is your marketing group still pretty much working that way?  And most of you are still working that way to some degree.  Sure you have digital channels but most companies don’t really incorporate the customer feedback they get from those channels in a sizeable and meaningful way.  I was at a marketing conference a few months ago and the keynote speaker (a marketing speaker and author) got up and gave a presentation about how marketing has changed.  The message was spot on, the reaction was shocking.  A room full of marketers and they were taking it in like this was new news!  It showed just how out of touch many marketers are with the changes going on around them.

Today, you don’t own your own brand, your customers define it for you.  The experience needs to be tailored to the customer, which is why they own your brand.  No longer do companies have the luxury of telling customers what to think, customers tell companies what they need to be in order to get their business.  Case in point, a CMO of a well-known company told me last year why he doesn’t bother listening to his customers.  Because he has a lifestyle brand and he defines it for them.  He no longer has that job.  His kind of thinking is out of date and customers don’t care for it anymore.  They want to be in control of their experience and are willing to pay you to help them achieve it.  They no longer want you to tell them what to wear, think or be, they can do that on their own.  They need your help to have the experience with your brand that they want.  That requires new tools and skills.

The new role of marketing

Marketing is changing, the skills are changing.  Yes, the data science guys get to come to the party, however many companies over index on these data science skills.  Most data scientist really don’t have the people skills to understand how to design for people.  Traditional marketing alone doesn’t have the skills for today either.  It really becomes a team sport with data science, some skills from the old ways like doing analysis with SAS, creative who can bring design think and psychologist, anthropologist and linguist to help engage customers in a more meaningful and relevant manner.  None of these new areas like data science can do what marketers can do, they just were not taught those skills.

You might also see people demanding marketing move to an “agile” process.  Most of those people don’t really know agile, they read a book or went to some seminar and believe they are now experts.  I’ve done many processes over the years, one thing I have learned is, no process works all the time.  Real success and innovation comes from using many methods at the same time.  Sure, use agile and Design Think and NPI, take what works and leave what doesn’t.  If you find yourself being forced to use scrum, ask about design think and how can merging the two help create a better experience.  The experience and the memory of that experience is what the customer will remember, not if followed scrum or NPI. 

Learn some coding, any coding is a good start.  Not all coding is the same.  I spent years on the front end, learning and using HTML and javascript.  Now I spend my time in the back with tools like python and D3.  Coding helps you to express your ideas in a new way.  You probably will not be a rock star coder, many of them started as kids and have a decade of experience by the time they are in the workforce.  What is often lacking is someone who can see the big picture and talk at the detailed level to engage the data scientist and developers, you marketers can fill that role, believe me, the need for that role is huge and most companies are learning the hard way that you can’t just leave it to developers and data scientist to make a user experience that users want, customer experience development is a team sport and not just left to the new hot job titles.  If leadership doesn’t understand this, odds are they don’t know what they are doing.

Marketers can add a lot to the new customer experience but you have to realize much of the old way of doing marketing just doesn’t work.  Go out and learn new methods.  Data science is nice but it’s powerful when you have someone who understands how to engage customers, not just data.  Anthropology is great but it’s far more impactful when you can take that information about human behavior and distill it to solving customers problems and co-creating customer experiences.  Yes, marketing as we know it is going away.  But that doesn’t mean the marketer has to go away.  There are plenty of things for marketers to do, if only you understand them.

Feel free to reach out and connect and share your thoughts and ideas with me.

Edward Chenard

Human Experience Architect