What Does It All Mean?

The new practitioner’s guide to marketing is here. Marketing Disrupted is a podcast series that highlights the industry’s ongoing transformation. Accenture Canada’s Digital Customer & Marketing Transformation Lead, Brent Chaters, co-hosts with bestselling author and technology reporter Amber Mac. They interview some of the top global CMOs and marketing leaders who get real on being comfortable with feeling uncomfortable. 

Over the past six episodes of Marketing Disrupted, we talked about the biggest themes and challenges in marketing today. We discussed data and analytics, corporate social responsibility, privacy and personalization, ROI, and the continuously changing role of the CMO – and that’s just scratching the surface.

We’ve now reached the end – our seventh and final episode – and it’s time to go back to the beginning to bring everything together. We also wanted to bring some of our incredible guests back for more insight on what’s next and how we can all get ahead of the wave.

From episode one, we welcomed back Jeffrey Hayzlett, CEO of The Hayzlett Group and Chairman of The C-Suite Network, to discuss some of the biggest mistakes that marketers make – and how to overcome them.

Hayzlett believes marketers still rely too much on an old model, which is affecting their progress.

“Now we’re dealing with people who will select and deselect messages in their own email,” Hayzlett describes. “A lot of CMOs still measure the game by eyeballs and ears when it’s clearly become a game of hearts and minds.”

We talk a lot about what technology has done to enable and transform marketers, but it’s given the same capabilities to consumers. Despite all the forces coming at them, consumers still have a lot of choice – they can tune out the messages, ads, and notifications that don’t speak to them, or that say too much. As a result, “hearts and minds” means a marketer has to continuously work to stay top of mind and connect with consumers.

Another thing to consider is that there are more faces to marketing than individual practitioners. Marketers need to adapt, but agencies also need to revolutionize their practice to be more hands on and “[solve] the problems of [the] customer in the best manner possible,” Hayzlett says.

Sticking with this idea of revolution, I really enjoyed our conversation with Guy Kawasaki, former Chief Evangelist at Apple, leading marketing expert and bestselling author. He lives and breathes agility and adaption.

Kawasaki believes that the core functions of marketing have stayed the same – “that you take your best shot at positioning and branding and what people should do, what appeals to them, how you should get to them, what they want to know,” he explains. It’s “the mechanism of getting that information to them” that has changed. 

Consider it message versus message delivery – people still need to know what your product does, how it works, if it will benefit them and where to get it, but they may look to social media before ads in the Wall Street Journal to find out about you.

Of course, the product or service itself is just as important as the marketing efforts. As Kawasaki shares on the podcast, “A key to evangelism and probably all of marketing … is it is much easier to evangelize or market something that’s great than crap.”

But it’s also not the be all, end all. “The $64 billion question is, ‘Well, what if I’m not working with something that’s great?’ … You have to either revise it to make it great or find a market that thinks it’s great.”

It goes back to our discussions about positioning and knowing what’s in your control. One of those things is the message that we’re using to describe the product or service.

As you fine-tune that messaging for your product or service, you may find yourself working on press releases or working with the press. Not surprisingly, there was a time when we thought those would be disrupted to the point of being obsolete.

“In 2005, the trope was social media – or we called it business blogging back then – is going to destroy advertising, destroy press releases, destroy journalism, and destroy, destroy, destroy.” That’s from Jeremiah Owyang, who you also heard from on episode four when we talked about new types of data and the art and science of marketing.

The founding partner of Kaleido Insights has seen industries come full circle and adopt social media, and many other disruptive technologies, to survive and evolve. “In fact, the main revenue driver of social media now is ads,” he says.

Looking to the future, Owyang hopes marketing programs prioritize teaching long-term skills over temporary tools.

“Teaching [future marketers] innovation, processes, how to quickly iterate and how to quickly adopt a new technology is a more important skill set than teaching them Facebook ads today,” Owyang emphasizes.

He also wants to reinforce empathy and ethics. These are the main human skills necessary from marketers, he says, to connect with their human consumers.

This is echoed by our final guest Brian Solis, who we also chatted with on our fifth episode covering corporate social responsibility and walking the walk. The author, speaker and Principal Analyst at Altimeter Group is all about making doing good part of the way you do business.

 “You can find ways to not just modernize touchpoints, but actually deliver touchpoints that deliver more than a transaction,” Solis says. For him, adding value means delivering positivity, productivity, personalization and “a lot of things that whether a customer realizes it or not is appreciated because it’s different and it feels different and it feels good.”

With that, I’m proud of what we covered in this podcast, yet know this is just a sliver of the conversation we will continue to have around the ever-changing world of marketing.

I’m also excited to take what I’ve learned from this podcast and apply it – and I hope you are too. I’ll start with a question Brian Solis poses on the podcast: “What is the voice that you as a marketer want to have?”

You can catch up on any Marketing Disrupted blogs you missed right here on my LinkedIn page.

Listen in! Marketing Disrupted is available to download on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast and wherever you get your podcasts. You can share your thoughts on the evolving role of marketing professionals with me on LinkedIn and Twitter.