Marketing vs marketing

All your marketing should ultimately drive growth.

This is an extract from IMTW № 87.

Read on to learn why:

① Marketing is unique in depending on a mix of art and science.

② All your marketing should be measured by how it contributes to growth.

③ Your pricing should be as simple and transparent as you can make it.

④ AI will take time to be useful and will require human operators to optimise it.

⑤ Social media was only ever one tactic; others include partners and events.

⑥ Now is the time you definitely should be using business cards.

⑦ Successful investing is a hot mess of contradictions.

Whats new

Transformation consultant and adviser Tom Goodwin wrote a LinkedIn post this week bemoaning the difference and lack of understanding between ‘traditional’ marketers and ‘growth’ marketers.

In short:

• “There are brand/traditional marketers. They pray at the alter of people. They focus on?empathy, understand the magic of a great idea, appreciate and respect the sheer oddity of people and the crazy way people behave.?They think of marketing like an orchestra, there are instruments and scores and tempo and a conductor, and they feel our way to great music with a passion. They think companies and brands need a vision, and a strategy and this should guide all decisions. They believe in seduction and persuasion and a degree of myth and haphazardness. They believe attribution is a fools errand.”
• “There are digital marketers. They pray at the alter of real time dashboards. They see marketing as growth. As a tool to endlessly bring in new users ( not customers) They have a love of numbers and logic, and above all else optimisation. For them marketing is a system, a workflow, a process to tweak, like a formula one cars pitstop, it’s just tasks in an order.?For them the dream of marketing is to have made the most effective tech stack. One that produces the best outputs. They believe attribution is the lifeblood of good optimisation.”
• “We do have periods where we favour one over the other. When the reality is that both ways of doing marketing have an enormous amount to learn from each other. We tend to do especially badly at recognising the brilliance and value the other side brings. We will always find it hard to combine two things that seem so culturally different, realistically one ‘hand’ will always be strong than the other.”

Why it matters

Tom is smart and I find the great majority of his writing thought-provoking but I think he’s wrong about this. Or at least he does ‘traditional’ marketers a disservice. In my experience, great marketers understand that all marketing is ultimately always about growth. There simply isn’t any other reason to do it.

That’s a reality that is being reflected in job titles too, with some CMOs transitioning to being chief growth officers (the FT reports this week that, in the UK, the biggest growth in jobs with the title ‘chief’ in recent years has been ‘chief growth officer’).?

Good marketers understand that they are there to serve the commercial objectives of the company. They also understand that there are a multitude of ways to achieve it and that working together seamlessly, not facing off against each other, is the best way. Indeed, this week HBR argued that organisations should involve all stakeholders — including those who will need to execute the growth strategy — in its conception and development.

① Marketing is unique in depending on a mix of art and science, creativity and analysis, experimentation and best-practice.

What to do about it

Take action

It’s a good idea to audit your marketing activities regularly. The nature of the work means that tactics have a habit of morphing and proliferating and pretty soon it’s not clear why you’re doing all the things you’re doing.

② All your activities should be framed in terms of outcomes and those outcomes should be measured by how they contribute to the company’s growth. But, in so doing, it’s important to remember two factors:

• Source Growth can come from new customers (measure acquisition) but it can also come from persuading existing customers to spend more (measure retention and share of wallet). And never forget that profit growth can also be driven by cost reductions and increased efficiency. This is all growth and marketing can and should play a key role in delivering it.
• Time Broadly speaking, it’s useful to think along three timeframes and to understand that different tactics will deliver for each.Short term: Lead generation campaigns, advertising, crisis communicationsMedium term: Messaging, positioning, public relations, social media, eventsLong term: Brand, content marketingThese are all marketing activities. And they should all contribute to growth. But they’ll do so along very different timelines.

Help me

If you found this useful?or know someone who would, please share it. It would really help me to grow the community of regular IMTW readers.

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For the rest of this issue, including points ③, ④, ⑤, ⑥ and ⑦, visit my Substack >

About

Written for CEOs, marketers and other leaders in the financial sector,?InMarketing This Week?is a showcase for news likely to impact them - delivered with insight on why it matters and ideas on what to do about it. It’s published every Sunday to give you a head start on the week. Read it?here, or subscribe to?have it delivered straight to your inbox at six, before it's available anywhere else.