What's limiting success?

Here are my thoughts on Day 2, and an emergent theme 2, from my time as co-Chair(with the admirable Ucheora Obi-Wheeler ) of the UK Chief Marketing Officer Conference.

Was Day 2 a more accurate picture of real life for the modern CMO?

(Day 1's summary here.

Disclosure: 100% of the contents were written by a human. I don't take lots of notes so if you were there - or better if you were speaking - could you add what I missed in the comments below?

'Chatham House rules' mean that views are non-attributable.)

We shouldn't be here. And why that's important.

By 'here', I don't mean Luton.

I mean here on Earth.

Our early hominid ancestors had smaller brains than another strain of hominids. And in evolution, the bigger brain normally wins more resources, more mates and more LinkedIn likes.

(Stay with me, I promise this is going somewhere relevant.)

But our ancestors' smaller brains had something special: a language centre.

It's been suggested that our ancestors were able to outcompete the bigger-brained chunky monkeys because the brains' language centres were an amplifier:

Language helped share ideas and build relationships.

We're here because of the unique power of language.

And when you're in marketing - what are you trying to do except share ideas and build relationships?

So what?

Well, besides from the supreme importance of creating language that moves beyond ABC (Accuracy, Brevity and Clarity) to do the real heavy lifting of amplifying your brand, I see the value of a conference coming from what's said on stage and what's said among the audience after.

Yesterday, the major theme emerging was AI.

Or more accurately,

Everyone feels everyone else knows more about AI than they do.

If this had been written by AI, we might have got to this point faster (but maybe less enjoyably?): Day 2 was much more about sharing peer-to-peer and my personal feeling was that as a result the energy was higher, there were more smiles and nods in the room and that it was a more valuable day.

And a definite, unaddressed theme emerged. Jump to the end for that.

Honesty, vulnerability and Stuart's singing.

Ten roundtables. 1 topic. Up to 12 people per table.

When I tried to make a joke about the table's moderator relaying their findings to the room through the medium of song, hats off to Stuart Heatley who did just that, improvising a rhyming couplet as well.

In summary:

Stuart's table covered how focusing on Customer Engagement

• builds revenues
• reduces the net cost of acquisition
• and - most importantly for those of us who sent a card 8 days ago - it keeps your customer a customer during the crap times.

Wioletta Niznik 's table talked about

• the need to bring the Brand into the Boardroom's regular discussion
• the importance of modelling ROI to help that happen (as well as to win investment)

Kevin Reid led a table that covered a lot of ground on the importance of Developing a Global Team. They highlighted

• the need to pay attention to the full breadth of stakeholder engagement
• how to integrate local knowledge into the global team and
• being mindful of the cultural implications: timings of meetings, making sure Face-to-face meetings happen and making sure all people feel accepted.

Table 4's discussion was around Sustainability in Marketing. (Apologies to the table moderator, I don't have your name. LMK and I'll edit it in here.) One of the key questions was

• Whose responsibility is it?
• And the fact that it's far, far easier to say why you should do it than it is to know how to do it.
• I was delighted to see that my own peeve - hypocrisy and in particular 'greenwashing' - was mentioned. (My thoughts here on how to use language to avoid greenwashing.)

Mike Forrest 's table talked about

• the danger of "scaling up for scaling up's sake" and
• the need to keep in mind the basics of 'What's our goal here?'

One of my favourite questions was whether people should build the systems first and then find the people to match the systems, or get the right people on board and then build the systems you need. I'm reminded of Jim Collins' excellent book, Good to Great, where he says,

First who, then what.

As he says, the people who build great organizations make sure they have the right people on the bus and the right people in the key seats before they figure out where to drive the bus.

I don't get paid to be a co-Chair. I mean, who could afford me?

I do it to meet interesting people (read: get out of the house) and to learn.

If you'd like to buy Good to Great, and earn me about 1p in the process at no extra cost to you, you can do that by clicking on this link: https://amzn.to/3UK6xC3

If you like your brain to share ideas and build relationships, I run a very occasional CMOs book club. No wine, all talk, sharing interpretations of new books that help with the CMO role. Let me know if you want in.

With so much talk about the power of AI to create, iterate and define a winner, this is the book I'd recommend from an earlier CMO book club evening:

Check out Optimizely 's review of the book here.

And apparently, there's a way to get a free copy of the book from their website.

I sat in on the Rebranding table, facilitated excellently by Nick Andrews MCIM The talk moved fast, covering

• establishing a rationale for the rebranding
• not moving without establishing organisational readiness and
• the need to do proper stakeholder mapping.

I don't want to mention one person more than any other - but I will.

I was stunned by the challenge facing Ajay Teli across so many disparate people, interests, experience and more. Good luck. I'll be watching and cheering from the sidelines.

Frankie McCrone 's table discussed AI & ML but was open about the general feeling of overwhelm and the pervading sensation when AI is moving so deep and fast into the CMO roles, that "I know nothing." They also mentioned

• the importance of continual benchmarking
• creating AI data safety through walled gardens

Pawanbir Singh MD-PhD 's table covered Content Management, with the need to

• remember to use location in your segmentation
• the challenge of continually proving how Content Management aligns with the overall business strategy

Over at Anthony Kennedy 's select group of participants talking about Customer Experience, they discussed

• the importance of creating organisational buy-in
• using data to fully personalise the Customer Experience

Finally, Romina Rodriguez moderated a table on Data & Customer Segmentation, which covered

• the need to continually explain the role and texture of data to people
• working with media agencies, whose data capabilities are often exceptional

Also, Romina was proud to be part of an all-female table.

Who's Line (Up) Is It, Anyway?

I always admired people who did improv in that great 80s TV show. How scary.

But I didn't expect to be improv'ing on topics and questions during the conference. So, a big thank you to Julia Holmes who wanted to raise the conversation about the ethics of AI and did the hard work in our fireside chat.

We covered two topics principally:

First, the importance of enforcing an unbiased data set in what your AI model is using.

Second, knowing about copyright and attribution. And properly paying the people who've done the early creative work.

I fancied creating a checklist of things that every CMO should ask their AI partners before engaging with their platform. Someone from the audience suggested a source for this, which I didn't record.

If you know one, please add to the comments.

I think ethics in AI is a moral question as much as a legal question.

"I have an itch"

I love creating new things. Especially when they're being created to meet a specific need.

So when someone at dinner said they had one burning question which none of the presentations had answered...and someone at breakfast said something similar, I realised there was a thing we could add to the Conference.

With a small gap of 30 minutes in the schedule, we opened the floor to allow anyone with 'an itch' to ask for solutions to something particular they needed help with, in the hope that someone else could scratch that itch for them.

30 minutes. 3 questions. Several answers. And we had to cut the session short.

I think it's something the organisers can bring back next year - if you ask them to.

It's a marathon, not a sprint.

One of the advantages of being an unpaid co-Chair is that you don't feel embarrassed asking for yet more gluten-free cake.

And also, that you don't have to cover every session.

So my apologies to those people who who ran sessions in the early afternoon of Day 2. It was you or cake.

Theme 2 emerges fully in the final Panel.

After Ucheora had done the good groundwork in prepping the panellists, I was able to host one final panel. This time on embedding Martech.

It was an interesting mix of absolute certainty and absolute honesty about the challenges.

Thanks to Alex Leay , Jason Cort , Adam Azor and Romina Rodriguez .

I think it was a huge relief for everyone in the room to hear that almost without exception, no one has a golden path to finding and installing the right martech.

It's trial and error was a common comment.

Of course, there's a need to know what you're trying to do.

And there's a need to understand that it's only with humans in the system that the whole thing works.

But what emerged most strongly here, and it was a crystallisation of what we'd heard in the last two days, was theme 2:

Without the ability to influence and persuade senior leaders, then we're stuck where we are.

There were some ad hoc tips on this subject, but I wonder whether including something on that in next year's session would be valuable.

What do you think?

That's it from me.

Thank you to the organisers, thank you to you for giving me the space to co-Chair in the way I felt was fun for me and helped keep things moving, and many thanks to the people who caught me on the way out and afterwards to say they'd appreciated my Chairing: if it works for you, then it works for me.

Thank you.

I've built a robust framework that will help any marketing team build a consistent yet flexbile brand voice across an organisation, engaging internal stakeholders and external customers more effectively.

"Any marketing team?"

Yep. I believe so. The framework has been used by alphabet's moonshot factory, a General Motors spin-off, a data science scale-up, a fintech launch, John Lewis, a European Parliament and a fine bunch of other people.

If you'd like to read a (ahem, #1 best-selling) book on how to do it, you can read the first 3 chapters just by clicking on the banner below (another affiliate link):

Last year's CMO keynote speaker said,

"This is the book that will help you create a brand voice your customers (and your CCEO) will listen to."

Thanks, Pete Markey