Is Marketing Creativity Dead?

Gartner’s illuminating 2020-21 CMO Survey is a must-read for marketers. It’s intelligent, chunkified, and timely.

But one thing is missing: deep actionable insights for technology marketers. Shockingly, Gartner finds that only a third of CMOs value brand marketing.

I was surprised also when a disconnect between CMO optimism and C-suite pessimism in their business outlook was noted without diagnosing the source of such a major issue. 

Together, these two facts indicate to me that the tech industry, from the C-suite down, is suffering from a fundamental dearth of insights-driven marketing creativity.

Tech CMOs are high on martech. They are stuck in the cloud, believing the solution to tech’s business problems is more tech. 

I’m not saying martech doesn’t have its place. But a whopping 26% of total spend is devoured by platforms. That leaves only table scraps for staple B2B tactics. 

Brand is clearly underleveraged. Where is the meaningful allocation for high-value insights-driven strategic initiatives?

Strategic insights are the difference that makes the difference. That difference fuels marketing creativity. This is as true for B2B as it is for B2C.

Why Insights Matter for Brands: A Case Study

An illuminating crossover example is Mastercard, a consumer brand that embraces its tech pedigree. Its primary business is developing and operating a ginormous distributed global network. 

Mastercard sells B2B, directly to tens of thousands of financial institutions worldwide. It advertises over the top to consumers, which reaches the company’s distributors, too.

Truth be told, payment cards are plastics, digits, and networks that enable people to access and spend money. In this regard, they’re a tech commodity, like SaaS, apps, or automation systems.

As a marketing executive at Mastercard, I did a ton of insights work on what tech calls end-users. You know, the emotionally driven human beings who attach to brands. 

The insights we unearthed jump-started two moribund multibillion-dollar lines of business. They also helped put the brand back on the map, dominantly so. 

Which, in combination with brand-specific, insights-rich, industry reeducation, loosened up a competitively-choked distribution channel.

Mastercard saw early that technology can undermine the brand it fuels. Operationally, payment interfaces reduce bank and card brands to digitized transaction data. 

By its very nature, card tech, i.e., interfaces, strips brand identity. To a brand-blind POS or ATM terminal, a card is a magstripe is a chip is an RFID. 

Protecting the brand against this inherent commoditization – the defense of the brand from its own tech – lies with end-users, aka cardholders, aka consumers, aka humans.

Extending the tech into new markets, like noncredit, meant penetrating syndicated research and competitive practices stymying the market. All of it was based on answers to the wrong questions.

By assuming nothing and developing a proprietary view, Mastercard discovered 7X higher demand for debit cards. Sophisticated insights unlocked the secret to exponential opportunity and unleashed a rapid-growth, multi-billion-dollar new market.

Learning to Tap New and Latent Markets

Another network giant is Cisco, which happens to dominate the now-ubiquitous but once-niche market for IT certifications. Cisco understood that end-user credentialing had strategic brand leverage.

Over time, Cisco invested in ANSI accreditation, which is vastly more rigorous than gold-standard regional accreditation. It also invested in online, state-of-the-art, digital courses. 

Cisco’s digital courseware is fully self-contained, richly multimedia, deeply interactive, and smartly gamified, with built-in diagnostics, automated remediation, and running in real time on virtual routers. 

I’ve had my hand at developing breakthrough educational technology for adult learners. I can attest that Cisco’s online IT courses are remarkable learning products.

I joined the Learning@Cisco IT certification training division after several years in ed tech and continuing higher education (CHE), a stealth, university-based, multibillion-dollar sector.

All post-secondary ed competes with CHE. Every university offers it to serve millions of adults with career ambitions.

CHE caters to these so-called nontraditional learners, who are predominantly educated, motivated, time-strapped, working, and professional.

They flock to these low-profile educational outfits for professional training, university-brand prestige, and transcripts for tuition reimbursement. 

Both CHE learners and providers are subject to the forces of the open market and seek a competitive leg up.

Online courses are prevalent and offer convenient access to specialized, regionally-targeted, job-related training. Technology is a top area of study. 

A Mastercard-like opportunity lay in this basic description. How could a company like Cisco give these learners – the company’s end-users – what they want and need? 

An insights-grounded, creative marketing solution to exploit this was a blast to chase. At maturity, it could easily anoint Learning@Cisco as Cisco’s newest billion-dollar LOB.

The Cisco and Mastercard scenarios share end-user insights as the keys to highly creative marketing solutions that deliver huge growth.

Regardless of positioning or market maturity, exponential power lies in insights-driven brand marketing. 

So, How Do We Bring Insights-Driven Branding into Tech?

Gartner is encouraged that 1/3 of tech CMOs are pursing brand strategy. In reality, this reflects scant investment in the insights’ skill set. That’s why tech marketing creativity seems dead.

Financial services used to hire packaged goods pros to bring critical and disruptive skills into their operations. Tech has tried to do the same with mixed results. 

Instead, tech should look to seasoned consumer insights pros to upgrade this capability. To do so, tech will have to get over its endemic ageism to find and capture this kind of deep talent. 

A brand isn’t a slick logo or clever tagline. Branding isn’t just advertising. SaaS-driven demand-gen isn’t a strategy. Marketing is more than marcom. And insights-oriented research extends far beyond creating personas.

Tech CMO nonbelievers need to get over their indifference to marketing insights. As the tech industry increasingly commoditizes, insights-driven brand differentiation will become more critical. 

Insights must drive beyond surface statistical inquiry and simplistic segmentation. To accomplish this, sophisticated insights skills need to be trained into all marketing personnel, from bottom to top. 

Tech must cultivate the ability to see into data, to ingrain the process of mining all the way to the vein of opportunity, to create persuasive narrative about it, and use this to forthrightly steer decision-making. 

A smart move for tech CMOs would be to seize on the marketing insights opportunity and to champion investing their marketing people with the capacity to forge powerful brand solutions using this skill set. 

This would begin to grow the culture of marketing creativity that high tech openly craves. In turn, such action would instill greater C-suite confidence by revealing the value of brand leadership.