The unspoken costs of not changing the way you do marketing

Think of the last marketing conference or event you attended. Was there at least one talk in which encouraged you to start your journey to digital transformation, showing the benefits of investing in change? Did you perhaps think, ‘That sounds great in theory…but we’d never get there from where we are now.’ The challenge for everyday marketing lies in how we practically implement transformational change, when incrementalism, cautious ROI metrics, and rightful scepticism of "tech buzz words" are still so prevalent.

My 'simple' answer is this: always keep experimenting with innovative marketing solutions at the edges.

Technological change in the marketplace of ideas should firmly explode the old fashioned myth that innovation means costly R&D. Relatively low cost innovation solutions in digital marketing abound today, from voice search, chatbots, and video, to digital assistants, conversational UX, micro-targeting and more. Yet, keeping creative new solutions at the edge of what we are doing get overshadowed by legitimate, yet often misplaced, fears of runaway costs. In fact, our cognitive biases and inertia too often also lead us to forget the warnings of voices in our profession which turn the question on its head and instead ask what is the cost of NOT innovating. Indeed, we should think of nurturing and sustaining innovation at the edge of what we do, but ready to overturn even ALL of what we are doing at the right moment. In this mindset, what we do should be framed as a portfolio of ongoing initiatives, some of which are maturing into extinction, others with high-growth potential ready to burst to the fore at the right moment. 

I was thrilled to find echoes of this thinking in the latest Mckinsey article on digital strategy which also speaks to such a vision of being willing to "fail fast" and fearlessly embrace a strategy of potential "big moves."

Much of this mindset involves managing the unfounded fear of exploding "marketing costs" which can get in the way of enabling cross-functional creative initiative. Actively soliciting ideas from employees, customers, and stakeholders should be a no-brainer part of today's corporate DNA.

There is simply no shortage of opportunities for innovation at the edge, what matters is the mindset which drives such opportunities into realization.

So, we just need to start active cross-fertilization across silos, challenging existing practices, rewarding initiative, and opening all marketing channels to listening and responding to customer input 24/7. Sounds easy? Not really, especially if we think it is simply a matter of issuing top-down dictates rather than empowering bottom-up creativity across teams. It especially takes time and persistence (but usually months, not years in today's telescoped innovation time) to learn how to marry the "engineering tech" with the "soft touch and trust" of marketing and sales. A recent example of successfully leveraging customer data platforms at The Economist demonstrated how innovation took months of overcoming the shortcomings of "people, process, and bandwidth." Marketers can learn to better pick up internal and external signals across corporate silos, as in a simple supply chain management example when a restaurant supply cooperative cuts its excess inventory by more than 50 percent by brainstorming via videoconferencing member leaders.

What should all this mean in terms of specific strategy?

Of course, specific answers will vary, and very fundamentally according to the demand dynamics, especially demographics, in different industries. For higher education institutions working with youthful demographics, using virtual reality and students as marketing ambassadors may be far more effective than traditional university catalogues and printed admissions material which may nonetheless still remain as secondary elements in a finely segmented omnichannel marketing strategy. On the other hand, marketing healthcare to today's demographic of sophisticated seniors may still heavily involve colourful brochures and other print media but complemented with customized online messaging. Whichever be the relative emphasis across your omnichannel marketing strategy, it is key to take full advantage of personalized marketing where even small businesses can achieve low-cost yet outstanding results through combining micro- and geo- targeting on mobile and online platforms. 

All of this supports, rather than undercuts, a disciplined approach to marketing ROI, as I have also written about in a blog post several months ago. In distilling all marketing to effective storytelling, I reminded readers that storytelling ROI is less easy to anticipate ex-ante, as well as calculate ex-post, as a cost-benefit ratio than for, say, a physical investment in plant and machinery. I also pointed out that, in costing both human inputs and non-human tools, what matters in achieving good ROI is less about analytics and more about marrying tech to the attracting and retaining of storytelling skills, all of which is about monetary incentives and non-monetary recognition, rewards, and other factors, and which also demand top management attention and investment of time.

For agile marketers, the message should be clear. An effective omnichannel marketing works only if your corporate culture has fully energized all internal stakeholders across silos and functions as well as all existing and potential customers - to actively share market signals and co-create the innovative products and processes that will make your business stand out from the crowd. Making data, automation, and AI your friend rather than something to be feared must be woven into that DNA. Top-down marketing strategies must give way to the creative impulses which jointly come from data analysts, developers, design experts, UX specialists, and keen-eyed storytellers. All this goes hand in hand with a disciplined ROI framework.

Above all, customer engagement across the customer journey is the only way to ensure that your strategy remains continually market tested rather than simply boardroom mandated. Not surprisingly, a recent CMO Council/Deloitte study -- on how chief marketing officers perceive their changing roles -- underscored how marketing leaders need to work harder than before to ensure alignment of their efforts with their C-suite peers. The solution: matching up the customer’s vision of need and value with the business’ definition of growth and success. Feel free to follow my Twitter feed for updates on all these aspects of this rapidly transforming and exciting landscape of marketing and customer engagement.