The Marketing function needs help.

It was about ten years ago that I first heard someone refer to marketing as the colouring in department. He was head of merch at a leading retailer and so I laughed it off as the sort of typical flex you might hear from a senior customer – as if he needed to reiterate the already massive power imbalance between supplier and retailer in this corner of the FMCG world.

Ten years on, and it has become less funny. Marketing departments have atrophied, their circle of influence has waned considerably. This, at a time when the function of marketing, the things marketing needs to be doing within an organisation are more critical, and more relevant to organisation success than ever before, and the tools we could be using to do it are more powerful than ever before. It’s time for Marketing to wrestle back some influence, regain its perceived value and stop reinforcing the idea that our main strength is being able to colour in.

Go straight to the end for 30 second summary if you don’t have the five minutes needed to read the whole thing this time!

For transparency, I come from a privileged start point in that I learnt my craft with Unilever at a time when Unilever was the largest and arguably one of the most progressive, consumer centric marketing lead organisations in the world. It is that perspective that I return to as I think of the fundamental functions that the Marketing function can play in leading organisations. I am over-simplifying for brevity but there are three core things that your Marketing team should be doing – all of which revolve around them being the most knowledgeable team in your organisation about your customer (for customer read consumer, end user, audience interchangeably):

1. Gaining insight and understanding of the customer to identify unmet, or poorly met needs and wants
2. ?Using that insight to help shape the product (or service) design to meet those needs
3. ?Generating demand for your product by effectively informing your customer what the proposition is and where it is available

I would go as far as to say that all the other cogs in the organisational machine only exist if these three things are done well. Nothing gets manufactured, distributed, presented to customers, no one gets to manage the people or ensure the finances are sound unless Marketing has done its job.

But here’s the problem... Somewhere along the way Marketing stopped being asked to do these things. Companies often skip the first stage altogether or rely on gut, or legacy, or what we can make. They have largely removed marketing from the second as product teams have evolved to cover this, and whilst the third is essentially A&P and includes branding, comms, distribution, even some aspects of this function, specifically digital channels have leaked from marketing.

Which does rather leave marketing playing with the brand logo and the comms, and if they are lucky, a brochure, some POS and advertising… these things, done in isolation and without the rigour and the strategic authority that comes from being a data-based expert in your customer, is not very far from colouring in. “The grown-ups have done the hard work designing and building the product, now perhaps marketing could just make it look pretty please?”

If Marketeers want to be thought of as more than the colouring in department and given their voice back at the strategic top table again, then they really need to step up and reassert themselves by becoming expert in those three core areas.

1. Consumer insights. The first is simple enough. If your organisation has a consumer insights team, then that’s a good start, it means someone is thinking about it at least. Ideally it would sit within marketing already, but it should be no surprise that it may well not anymore, in which case, Marketers need to make sure they are as close to this team as possible. Everything starts with an understanding of your customer, and so thinking outwardly about them should inform every decision you make. If the Insights team is not in Marketing or your organisation is too small to have a specialist team, there is still plenty you can do by way of desk and industry research, customer immersion exercises, frontline experience etc that can help you have a more customer informed perspective. If it is in marketing already, then make sure you actually use the information and insights. Your credibility as a marketer will not be won through over-optimistic interpretation of selected data that aligns with the project you already want to do… it will be won by building your ideas on data-based insights that increase the chance of the idea having actual merit and working in market.

2. The second is in product design. Somehow, this fundamental role has often been divorced from the core function of Marketing and moved into product teams that variously report into a Chief Strategy Officer, COO, CXO or R&D lead. Unencumbered by the historic disciplines of Marketing, these teams have successfully reinvented the wheel and bought into a shiny new toy called Design Lead Thinking as a means of unearthing customer informed product.

I don’t disagree with Design Lead Thinking by the way. For me it is completely self-evident that product design should start by empathising with and understanding your customer, designing a solution for their needs, testing it, and iteratively improving it. Marketing as the champion for your customer should own this process. Of course they need to bring in others from across the organisation as they don’t have a monopoly on empathy and insights, and definitely not on product or service design, or how it could be practically taken to market, but they absolutely need to be the best within any organisation at understanding the end user and their needs.

But by calling it Design Lead Thinking and creating a speciality it doesn’t sound like something the colouring in department should be trusted with. The terminology isn’t going away any time soon, so Marketing needs to embrace it and overtly adopt the principles of it and the lexicon in their approach to anything from UX, CX, product or even comms, brand and proposition design and development. (Ironically, it is a branding issue as much as anything!)

3.???Demand Generation. Even in the most depowered marketing teams, demand generation remains a core expectation. Often in conjunction with sales of course, but this is at least the place where marketers are expected to perform. Once again though, marketing’s circle of influence has shrunk as channels to market change and organisations embrace Digital Transformation.

In Marketing the opportunities from Digital Transformation are genuinely revolutionary. It means automation, personalisation at scale, it means real time optimisation of message and channel, it means martech that enables joined up thinking throughout the customer journey - right up to and including making the sale with eCommerce capability, and integrating your CRM with your digital experience platform and algorithmic learning to make sure that your communication with your potential customer is seamless and brilliant throughout the funnel, across platforms and media.

The tech has the potential to enable joined up thinking at its best – what marketers have dreamed of being able to do. A decade ago, organisations started creating digital teams alongside their traditional marketing teams. It was a specialist skill that generalist marketers didn’t have, and as digital channels became more widely used and understood, and importantly measured, it seemed to create a neat divide between the long term, brand building activity that the marketing team were good at, and the rapid, short term, measurable performance that digital offered.

As a result, teams evolved separately and in many cases have stayed that way with Digital Teams sometimes looking after digital market facing assets such as website UX, performance media, even the CRM in some cases. Often the two streams only converge at the very top of the tree within an organisation and very likely that apex position (Chief Digital, Data and Brand for instance) is specialist in only one or the other of the streams.

But no customer thinks in such binary terms. For them, the brand they see on the bus-side, the digital touchpoints, the human interface with customer service are all part of their interactions with an organisation or the CX. So, if they are not joined up, how can the end user make sense of what the offer really is? As those digital channels have evolved and technology such as personalisation engines and automation make it possible for that CX to be managed brilliantly and seamlessly, it is rarely done so. Why? Because all the digital technology in the world won’t get you a single new customer if it and the team’s energy is not orientated coherently around your customer needs. Equally, excellent channel mix optimisation of a poorly thought-out idea or proposition, will still not get you very far.

So the two streams have to converge in everyday operational sense and not just at the apex. The best way for marketers to regain this circle of influence is to invest time and effort to understand digital properly. Perhaps not enough to execute, but definitely enough to steer, join the dots and translate. It is not easy to do as much of the language around digital is completely new to traditional marketers, and especially those that have grown up in a depowered marketing environment, but it has to be worth the effort otherwise you are left in the analogue team and you are back to the crayons…

Rant over, this is why it all comes back to the customer. It is imperative that whatever function owns the customer knowledge and insights, they also use that to inform product design and go to market strategy and execution. You join these dots around the CX, generate the demand and the rest of the organisation executes and aligns around that. This is what Marketing can be. This is why Marketing is the most fundamental discipline in any organisation. This is why Marketing is so much more than colouring in, and why Marketing needs to earn its way back to being front and centre of the strategic conversation.

And just so we’re clear, ‘colouring in’ well should not be undervalued. Like the proverbial turd rolled in glitter, marketing teams can make things a lot better by presenting them well and talking about them coherently. It’s just that it would be better if they could also help make sure it wasn’t a turd in the first place.

30 Second version:

• Whatever your industry, unless you are abusing monopoly powers, then it is a very good idea if your end customer is at the centre of strategy and therefore should be reflected in your organisational thinking.
• The Marketing function used to “own” this - from customer insight through product design and experience. Done well, it would provide clear direction for the whole machinery of the organisation as well as meaning that eventual creative execution (copy, design, advertising etc) was founded on fundamental customer insight and need.
• Over the last decade the various customer functions (insights, product design and demand generation) have been fragmented and largely removed from a disempowered central Marketing function, leaving Marketing at the end of the chain to “go and make this look nice and help us sell it” – i.e. doing the colouring in…
• This is a fundamental mistake. Without the coherence of a single customer informed view, organisations will struggle to meet customer need as well as they could. At worst it means enormous, wasted effort (cost) creating and pushing a product that the market rejects, and at best it means inefficiency (cost) and opportunity for a competitor to step in (revenue loss).
• If this challenge resonates with your organisation, it’s probably worth your time thinking about these questions and whether it’s worth reconsidering the remit of the Marketing Function:

1. Map the critical customer functions in your organisation (customer insights, product design, demand generation and sales) and identify where responsibility for these tasks sit. If they are disaggregated and spread across the structure, then consider how you might pull them closer together so that a strong, coherent line of sight to your customer runs through the organisation.
2. Ask yourself, if we were designing this thing from scratch, could we do this better? Are we really putting what we know about the customer at the centre and is this coherent and consistent? Are we compromising the customer experience somehow to fit around us (inside-out thinking)?
3. If the label Marketing is too irrevocably and intrinsically associated with ‘colouring in’ in your organisation, then we just might need to come up with a new moniker for the same function. Consider swapping the word Marketing with Customer, noting that the benefit is not in the title, but in the actual intent to orientate around your customer.