In my last post, I left you with the image of us as marketers, standing before the deep, dark woods of transformation—moving from digital marketing to marketing in a digital world. We know we need to get to the other side to break the tradeoff between scale and relevance, but we aren’t sure how.
Recall from the first blog post, CEB research shows us that continuing a strategy of bolting on digital components to our old system won’t work. But, it feels risky to really crack open our marketing system and make wholesale change. As marketing leaders, we could put our jobs on the line if we screw that up.
With this in mind, I want to shine some light on the path forward to show where we need to go and what the first steps look like – all based on our in-depth research.
Let’s take a look at where we need to go first. In other words, what kind of marketing system should we build?
Marketing for Discovery, Not Delivery
Previously, I outlined the old marketing system—a “delivery-based” system that was built over decades to reliably deliver scale via pre-planned, big bang, point-in-time communications through paid media. However, what we need in today’s networked world is a system that can really amp up the relevance to meet consumers in their context, but also one that scales well so marketing doesn’t continue to be the least happy function.
The core elements of this system are those four blue boxes running down the middle of the graphic above – Open Creation, Uncertainty Management, Shared Vision and “Free” Leverage – along with the bullets underneath them. Here’s how to read this:
Open Creation: The winning marketing systems are going to take a co-creative posture in all that they do, and will also have vibrant partner ecosystems with which to do the co-creation.
Why? That’s in the far left column. Foremost, with consumers expecting differentiated, contextually relevant experiences, we’re going to have to work with partners who have the skill sets and insights to be able to deliver these kinds of experiences. Part of relevance these days is speed, and by co-creating with these chosen partners we can also cut cycles out of the old, delivery based approach of test, test, test and then launch when perfect.
Moreover, with consumer trust in brands on the decline, brands can get a much needed credibility boost by working with partners who share the purpose of the brand—it’s passion or belief. Note: if your brand doesn’t have this kind of purpose or “shared value,” you’ll want to develop that.
Uncertainty Management: This element is all about agility. Winning brands will have a tolerance for “good enough.” They’ll have an ability to manage contingent decision, meaning they won’t pre-plan everything, but will launch and then test and iterate based on market reaction. They’ll also be very good at shifting resources to the areas of greatest opportunity and need.
Why is this important? Well, at the most basic level, to be relevant with consumers we have to be able to engage in conversations with them. Conversations are, by their very nature, contingent. They’re unpredictable. We have to create a system that manages that uncertainty well. Also, more than ever, we have the ability to see how consumers are behaving in the moment. If we don’t get good at responding, competitors will.
These two elements together—Open Creation and Uncertainty Management—get us the relevance part of the equation. We can sense what will be relevant to consumers, and create and adjust rapidly to engage consumers in their context. This is where we saw the Agile discipline of software development being adapted and applied in a marketing context—with scrums and stand-ups, with coders and marketers working hand-in-hand, and with highly self-organized teams.
Now, jump down to the bottom of the graphic, because this is where we get the scale part of the equation.
“Free” Leverage: This is the real missing component, in many ways. We can get flashes of relevance with digital bolt-ons to our old delivery-based marketing system, but we exhaust our marketing teams because it doesn’t scale. So, we need to find scale in some combination of mobilizing third parties to carry water on our behalf, and/or through automation.
These sources of leverage are the force multipliers that give us the reach and depth we need as large brands, but without relying on the labor inside our marketing system (which includes agencies, remember). That means a good dose of technology-enabled automation of marketing activities. And that also means really mobilizing our consumer networks, or the networks of other third parties, to achieve our marketing objectives.
If we stopped at these three components, what we’d have is a high-RPM system that is rapidly iterating, discovering where consumers are going, what they’re talking about and engaging them accordingly. But there’s a huge risk here—our system could be discovering its way to nowhere, iterating in circles and chasing fleeting consumer conversations or trends. How do we keep this high-RPM system focused on driving business results?
That’s where the final element comes in. It’s a critical one, and often gets overlooked in the excitement of the technology and fast pace embedded in the first three elements.
Shared Vision: Winning marketing systems are going to be really good at establishing focal points and guardrails to keep the high-RPM discovery-based marketing system moving in a direction that is fruitful for the business. As we spent time with companies that are leading the charge here, we noticed they spike very strongly on this component. They have re-defined their brands around a shared value—a higher-order passion, belief or philosophy that the brand credibly shares with consumers. They’ve established navigational waypoints through the woods—these take the form of brand narrative arcs that extend across time and create conversation momentum and scale around the brand’s shared value. They also take the form of technology roadmaps—capability-based roadmaps that guide marketing technology investment over a 24-36 month horizon.
We also see these brands building group mental models of the way marketing is done across their entire marketing system (including those inside of marketing, agency partners and strategic technology partners).
Jazz, Not Symphonies
These four elements—Open Creation, Uncertainty Management, “Free” Leverage and Shared Vision—are the traits of the marketing systems we need to be building. At CEB, we’ve come to call this the “discovery-based” marketing system (to contrast with the old “delivery-based” system). It’s a more open, agile and organic-feeling system, but one that proceeds with great purpose as it discovers (often hand-in-hand with consumers) its way through a chaotic marketplace.
The metaphor we like to use in comparing “discovery-based” marketing to “delivery-based” marketing is jazz vs. symphony. In the old world, our marketing system was like an orchestra, built do deliver precisely scripted symphonies with incredible fidelity, each part of the orchestra knowing exactly its role in delivering the symphony.
But consumers these days expect jazz. And while jazz still has rules, it’s more free flowing. The saxophonist might riff here, and the trumpet-player and drummer need to be on the same wavelength to pick up the change and move with it, to shift with the feeling and yet create something melodious. No sheet music. No precise choreography.
That requires a jazz band, not an orchestra. That’s a different marketing system, with different ways of creating music (the marketing)
And note, the jazz band is smaller than the orchestra. What we’ve seen from our studies so far is that small teams can achieve amazing results inside of these discovery-based marketing systems. That’s because software, networks and other digital technologies enable us to get agility and scale at the same time, and often with far fewer people. If you’re a student of Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s The Second Machine Age, you’ll know what I’m talking about.
We’ve seen a handful of marketing organizations like those at
