Making Marketing More Commercial: Part 1: Why be commercial?
Tim Beveridge
Modern Marketer | Consultant | CMO | MAICD | MAMI | MBA | B2B & B2C | Strategy | Commercial Creativity | Data | Culture | Technology | Building effective marketing operating systems.
This is part 1 of a 4 part series: Making Marketing More Commercial. To read the other parts:
Over the past 7 or so years, I've spent quite a bit of time trying to build ways for marketers to predict their commercial impact prior to taking an action. The idea being that a marketer can integrate a predictive ROI metric into their evaluation of the best course of action at any point in time across a wide array of the key decisions. Also, once an action is taken they can measure the commercial impact of that action against that same metric.
Through these efforts I've got very very deep into the intricacies of MMM, Continuous Brand Tracking, using eSOV Analysis (or Share of Market vs Share of Voice) to quantify shifts in brand equity over time, evaluate the relationship between budgets and targets, align planned actions to strategic need, and to quantify the commercial impact of those actions. Along the way I got really deep into understanding how to bring big-data tools front and centre in the process to make attribution, analysis, and optimisation faster and more effective, and I built methods to tighten the connection between the strategic frameworks guiding marketing actions with the analytic frameworks measuring their effectiveness.
More recently I've become unreasonably passionate about helping marketers to improve their agility and fluency with the commercial dialogue in the boardroom in an effort to establish a more credible platform for them to operate from.
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Without question, Marketing is the most dangerous seat in the C-Suite. Speaking broadly, the vast majority of Marketing budgets and FTE allocations are set and evaluated against the 5% of marketing work that people see, rather than what’s needed for an organisation to get full benefit from the discipline. This leads to a whole raft of un-constructive behaviours. An over-focus on the window-dressing of marketing at the cost of strategy, the exclusion of marketing from the firms’ important strategic choices, and often the elevation of marketers too early in their career stunting their strategic growth and forcing them to instead build their political muscle to stay alive. Which of course also becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the established view of the firm is that marketing isn’t a commercial capability, they will hire a marketer without that ability and put them into the most senior marketing role. Which in turn cements their own view of marketing within that organisation. And the cycle continues.
Having said all that, there is hope. The work of Ehrenberg-Bass, Binet & Field, and others give the profession an incredibly deep scientific, commercial, and defensible basis on which to operate. And the increasing availability of big data platforms, and generalised capability with using them means that as Marketers we have more weaponry at our disposal than ever before.
But for the commercially-minded marketer, or the marketer who aspires to be taken seriously at the commercial table but finds themselves in an organisation that sees marketing as the campaign department, the battle isn’t over. Generally speaking when your audience is non-marketers, they don't give a shit about your brand metrics or your click through rates. You can have all the data in the world, but if you don’t use it right, you’re dead. If you want to command a seat at the commercial table, using data the right way, educating well, and converting marketing numbers into commercial numbers is essential.
In order to frame this correctly and completely, we need to start from the start with some myth-busting. What this means is that this piece is a bit long, so I’ve broken it into 4 key sections which stack together:
Part 1: Why be commercial?