Marketing: Reboot for the digital age.

I keep hearing from traditional marketing folks, that something very strange is happening to marketing. And not in a good way. “All marketing just can’t be performance marketing”, “the art of marketing is disappearing under the weight of the tech”, “when did marketing become statistics”, “doesn’t anyone care about brand anymore”, “attribution measurement is just smoke and mirrors” etc. You get the picture.

Now, it is true that the ability to measure ROI in the digital world has led to a surge of interest in “measurable marketing”. Most marketing teams are starting to track and measure leads to sales performance almost like sales teams. And businesses obviously love this. But beyond all that, there seems to be something else at play here. It appears that “digital” has fundamentally altered the landscape and hence the models based on which the practice of traditional marketing was carried on.

It has reset our definition of “consumer”, improved our ability to personalize messaging while simultaneously reducing our control over brand conversations, mainstreamed the focus on corporate behavior behind the brand, flattened the purchase funnel, scattered the purchase journey and so on. So if one came from a world of neat models like 4Ps, Porters forces etc.,??it may be time to view marketing from a somewhat different lens.

This discussion can obviously get very complicated, especially if we dive into the deep end of mar/ad-tech, personalization, attribution and AI etc. It’s easy to get lost in that maze. People tend to get all wound up in the nuts and bolts, without factoring in the fundamental changes to the building blocks. One can start believing that all marketing has become “performance marketing”, while in reality the role of marketing in curating relationships is becoming even more critical by the day.?

In this regard, it may be useful to just start with a very simple, new model of looking at the marketing and consumer landscape. The initial model that I now personally start with, is as follows:

Let’s look at each of these components, in order to understand the model better.?

The underlying assumption is that marketing is now all about creating vibrant?communities?around your brand or product premise and?engaging?effectively and deeply with these communities. And in the process of doing that, one ends up impacting a broad swathe of individuals within those communities.

So how does one do that? The bridge to reach communities appears to be good old?“stories”. The better the stories we craft, the deeper the engagement with our desired communities.

Hypothesis 1- Think “communities” rather than “consumer”:?An era of hyper personalization and almost intrusive targeting may lead us to believe that we are now ready to focus even more sharply on who our consumer is and talk only to that person. But the reality in the digital world is that it is actually harder to define who exactly needs to be spoken to, in order to close a sale! Counter intuitive, isn’t it????The reason is that when a potential sale goes through its interest-consideration to purchase cycle, it is now dependent on not just a consumer making up her mind, but many other factors such as influencers, opinion leaders, peers, experts, rating engines, reviewers and critics, YouTube unboxers and so on.?

It gets really complicated because there is no longer a clean “funnel” that the consumer passes through, while receiving conveniently phased marketing messages at every stage. Instead, the potential buyer moves back and forth, while being buffeted by varying voices from the ecosystem of interested parties around the brand or product.?

One might argue that some version of these forces always existed in a marketing ecosystem, but their influence is greatly magnified in a social media led digital ecosystem.?

So how does one handle this complex ecosystem of people that need to be spoken with? It’s very hard to segment and target all of them separately & effectively. An easier alternative is to actually think of them as?“one community”?and target all marketing to that community.

Hypothesis 2- Engagement rather than outcomes:?It’s much harder to engage with the community, because the community doesn’t care that you want to sell a new rat trap to the kid down the road. They are instead interested in how the brand or product relates with each of them in their individual lives, hopes and dreams.?

It wants you to respect its independence of opinion, while making each individual feel special at the same time. Many of these expectations are contradictory in nature and hard to craft into one common communications strategy. So rather than trying to blend multiple outcomes, it becomes more practical to simply strive for (and measure) greater?engagement, which then hopefully flows organically to desired outcomes.

Hypothesis 3- Stories form the bridge:?The gap between complex communities with varying expectations/needs and a marketer who wants to drive deep engagement with them is a tenuous chasm. The very traditional medium of stories has emerged as an effective bridge. Why? Because communication connects with the human element, which forms the basis of all relationships and it allows us to impact individuals deeply, while still speaking to the community.

Here is where the good old facets of brand values, creativity, art etc. come in, because your messaging has to be sufficiently broad to cover everyone, while driving very specific business results. That can’t be done by blasting out product/feature & benefits driven communication like the good old days. It has to far cleverer and more subliminal communication. And that is what we are seeing from many brands today that don’t seem to say anything about the product. Instead they take you on a journey, that somehow feels good. Think Gillette’s “the best that men can be” campaign, Facebook’s “Pooja Didi” campaign, Tinder’s “in our own way” campaign and so on…?

Great! But how does one actually execute all of this?

Again, a simple high level method is to look at 4 fundamental drivers that help drive engagement in the digital world. How good is the?content, how well has?data?been leveraged, how effectively has?technology?been used… and of course, how much?spending power?do you have??. An optimum balance of these 4 levers can help us craft deeper engagement with our communities, through stories.

a.?????Content:?Hallelujah! Creativity lives. What’s more, it’s critical.?

When brand managers whine at their agencies, saying “can you make it viral?” … this is what they are actually asking for. Intelligent, engaging, emotionally aware “content” that grabs peoples attention.?

This can be a whole plethora of vehicles such as video, gaming, polls, advertising, blogs, hybrid models and so on. But the underlying theme is the ability to interact in a meaningful and entertaining manner with an audience. One that will click away in a second, if you are even a tiny bit banal in your approach. So for those who say “the art of marketing is dead”, I would counter that it is even more critical now. Because we are dealing with a broader and more fickle audience.?

Gone are the captive hostages who would blindly sit through a repetitive, nauseating ad, 12 times in a day. Just because it was coming in between a live match that one could only watch on that one medium, at that very time. The new age marketer literally needs an entire universe of “creators” by her side.?

Authors, domain specialists, scriptwriters, visualizers, singers, film makers, photographers, comedians, movie directors, gamers, video editors, artists and so on. Plus someone who can make it all stick together.?The breadth of creativity needed is much, much more.?

b.?????Data:?Needs no introduction. It’s available in buckets. It needs very smart people, technology and tools to leverage it.?

If you do not have a formal data strategy and the right AI and analytics tools that are mining insights, which are then tailored into your content strategy, you are pretty much toast. Might as well pack up and go home. Enough said.?

Everyone’s heard the “data is the new oil” spiel already. Research tells us that data driven orgs are 23 times more likely to acquire customers and 6 times more likely to retain them! Get yourself either areally good analytics partner?or a dedicated team.

c.?????Technology:?It’s a tool. And a damn effective one. You’re being offered a Ferrari. Don’t insist on driving your old Ford Escort?:-).?

While saying this, I must acknowledge that the plethora of marketing tools and aids available out there now can be potentially blinding. Right from campaign planning and automation, to targeting, personalization, tracking, geotagging, attribution etc. There are multiple options that can be used at every stage.?

Tech is very much of a double edged sword. When implemented badly, it can exist just for itself, with marketing teams groaning and using tools that they don’t really believe in. But when intelligently architected and held together, they can multiply marketing efficiency multifold.?

A common mistake made is that marketing (or even worse, sales or finance) defines their requirements piecemeal and IT procurement goes out and buys / implements the tools. The role of?a highly skilled solution architect?or consultant who looks at the entire marketing business process holistically and then defines the full solution stack is still evolving. But it is certainly worth investing into.?

d.????Budgets:?Self-explanatory and the one thing that always remains constant. The more money you have, and the smarter you can spend it, the more successful your digital campaign is likely to be.?

The catch is that you can have a lot of money and end up spending it very unwisely in the digital world. And this circles back to tech and data once again. For e.g. If you don’t really understand ad-tech, marketing to communities can turn into a fancy version of “spray and pray”. If your analytics team isn’t tracking ROI closely, it can hark back to the old days of “just account it against brand equity” and so on.?

No matter how much you love the good old days of not being answerable on budgets, it’s time for marketing leaders to?get hard-nosed about spends. Because the environment now allows us to be. And if we don’t, then someone else will take a long, hard look at how the money is being spent.

I’d like to conclude by citing the example of a brand that is pretty close to my heart. a.k.a Royal Enfield, the iconic biking brand that seems to have been unstoppable in the last decade. If you examine their marketing (across channels) closely, you would notice that they really don’t focus on saying that their motorcycle is better in any way. Instead, they pour all their efforts into building the travel biking community. And into capturing what is euphemistically called “the spirit of biking”. They talk to influencers as well as buyers. Adventure riding and human interest stories form the bedrock of their communication. The net result is a die hard, aspirational community that simply pays no heed to any logical arguments about speed, reliability, handling etc. They would much rather just “belong”. That is a very powerful brand position to be in. They could certainly do much better on leveraging data and technology. But they seem to have pinned community engagement down pretty well.

So finally, the aim of a digital campaign can be pretty simple actually. Just focus on increasing the size and strength of the engagement-intersection area?that we defined in our initial diagram. And the way to do it, is by leveraging the 4 levers of data, tech, money and content. Pretty simple, isn’t it??:-)

(c) Sandeep Menon