What Marketers are saying about change

This week I attended Marketing Week Live, a two-day conference run in London for Marketing professionals to get together and talk. It’s a great way to get a feel for the marketer's take on the world. 

It’s the second year I’ve been, and the tone of the presentations had definitely changed. Last year, the speakers were talking more about the tools and channels. Instagram was a big theme last year as were millennials and the disruption voice search would bring. And then just one lone speaker was presenting on GDPR. Just look at how that has changed.

This year the tone was less about channels, and more about the power of the customer, storytelling and a return to strategy. Here are the themes I took away as a business transformation person listening in on 2,000 marketers talking.

1.    Strategy is back

Marketers seemed to feel they now had permission to go back to a world of well-considered brand strategies focused on who they serve and why. The brand strategy as an articulation of the corporate strategy, it doesn’t start with a product and then look to who it can sell it to (as it was last year) instead it starts with the customer and their needs. The customer is in charge and making sure the organisation gets that customer focus right is a CEO’s job.

2.    Everyone is storytelling

Last year 'authenticity' was mentioned in many presentations, and this year the repeated term was 'storytelling'. Using the techniques of storytelling to build an emotional connection with customers. Understanding people’s irrational behaviour was also a popular theme within that. 

3.    Brand strategy is more than the customer experience

Customer centricity is everything, however, there was a collective understanding that customer experience was just one articulation of that brand strategy - there are more component parts that need to embrace it. Which means marketing needs to work with others. It’s important that the culture, employees and the back-office operations are all articulations of that brand strategy. The difficulty in connecting all parts together under one coherent brand strategy and set of behaviours was understood as a huge challenge with the pace of internal organisational change far behind the pace of market change.

4.    Speed is vital for product, service and content delivery  

There was a lot of talk about agile, lean and the need for speed. Development of products, services and content needs to be fast and customer-centric. In these areas, people need to know how to adopt behaviours that allow them to be customer-centric and test and learn at speed. All in line with that considered brand strategy thereby combining considered with reactive.

5.    Data analytics feed the customer view

Marketing has historically been the part of the organisation that talks to customers and they are seeing themselves as well placed for this customer-centric world. The marketing department needs to be equipped to provide data analytics that can fuel those fast timescales - which is introducing a much wider skill set to marketing teams. One speaker commented that with data insights in their back pocket, the CFO who has stopped seeing marketing as fluffy which was celebrated.

6.    Consumer-generated content is a gift

Consumer-driven content is massive and comes thick and fast which is a huge opportunity for brands. Regardless of what channel combination used, having a strategy to co-create content with consumers and use micro influencers (who get twice the engagement of big shiny influencers) is vital. And with 61% of the UK time online being on a mobile - not enough people are thinking mobile first.

7. Marketing provides the map

Organisations now have so much information at their fingertips and marketing see themselves as the guides to help the organisation to make good use of it. With masses of data being collected on the consumer, insight is needed to know what to do with it. Otherwise, as one speaker put it 'it's like having a room full of telephone directories. Without insight that data is useless.

Likewise, with consumer-generated content, there needs to be a way to make the most of it. With 20% of the songs on Spotify having never been listened to once, you want to avoid being clutter. Marketing has the tools and techniques to cut through the volumes of data and consumer-generated content. But to do that the marketing department needs to be set up with the right skills and people.

8.    No-one was talking millennials

Whereas last year it was all about recognising millennials’ needs as distinct. This year the term millennials was collectively understood as a stereotype, not a segment.

9.    By next year no-one will be saying digital

‘Digital’ was no longer viewed as separate. One presenter whispered ‘the D word’ apologetically when they had to mention Digital. Although many attendees still had digital in job titles, this was recognised as a fading label that won’t be around next year.

It was an interesting two days and great to hear the marketer's perspective. Thank you Marketing Week Live.

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I help organisations with the internal culture and behaviour change they need for a fast new world. If you'd like to talk more, then please get in touch or visit my blog for more articles like this.