Are young marketers now the “smartest people in the room”?

June 29, 2015June 29, 2015 Phillip Nones Business, Marketing, Marketing Communications Baby Boomer Generation, Baby Boomers, Boomers, Business, Corporate Marketing, Deanie Elsner, marketing, Marketing Strategy, marketing technology, Millennials, Tapad, Unify Tech

Recently I read about some interesting remarks made by Deanie Elsner, who is the former executive vice president and chief marketing officer of Kraft Foods.

Ms. Elsner made them as the keynote speaker at the Tapad Unify Tech 2015 cross-screen technology conference held in mid-June. The gist of her argument was that senior-level marketers and heads of companies are most often the ones who are the “ball and chain” in a company when it comes to following effective marketing practices.

The way Elsner sees it, too few of these officials understand digital marketing as an integrated program that commingles data with a coordinated brand strategy:

“When you ask marketers to define digital strategy, they will give you ‘random acts of digital’ rather than an holistic strategy informed by data, with KPSs and data points that prove success.”

It doesn’t help that most upper-level managers are part of the Baby Boomer generation or just slightly younger, whereas most of the big developments in marketing technology and the communications landscape are being driven by Millennials.

[An aside: recently we learned that Millennials, at 87 million strong, are now this country’s largest age cohort — ~14% larger than Baby Boomers. And they’ll only grow more important in the coming decade or two as the Boomer generation passes into retirement and then into history.]

In Elsner’s view, Millennial employees understand something that their older counterparts generally don’t see, which is that the “one-way communications” perspective on advertising and promotion is no longer so important — or even relevant.

I can see her point. Consumers today are the ones determining the conversation and the agenda. It’s up to marketers to figure out the best ways to follow that agenda and to use the best tools to make it happen.

But then Elsner makes this bold statement that I’m not sure is totally accurate:

“Your smartest person is your most junior talent. The most dangerous, potentially, is the current CEO, because what they know doesn’t exist anymore.”

I don’t disagree that junior talent “gets” the modern communications environment more inherently than older employees. However … younger talent is prone to the opposite extreme: making assumptions based the latest trends for the youngest audiences.

When that happens, people can misread how industry changes affect consumers of all age levels, other demographics and psychographics.

In fact, in my work with numerous corporate clients, often the “smartest person in the room” is the one who’s over the age of 65. And why not? The reality is that irrespective of the seismic changes in marketing, there’s a lot to be said for 20 or 30 years of life experience to truly understand what makes human beings “tick” … why people are often so different … and what makes them choose to do the things that they do.

So the bottom line is actually this: Both younger and older marketers are important and can bring a lot to the table, and there’s more than enough respect to go around.

So Many Marketing Channels … So Many Vendors …

March 11, 2015March 11, 2015 Phillip Nones Advertising, Human Resources, Marketing Communications channel communications, Communications Channels, Direct Marketing Association, marketing, Marketing Budgets, Marketing Channels, Marketing Organization, Marketing Staffing, Marketing Strategy, Vendor Management, Yes Lifecycle Marketing

Managing multiple vendors has become nearly a full-time job for some marketers.

Managing channel communications isn’t very easy for marketers these days, that’s for sure. It’s because so many companies are using multiple outbound channels to connect with their customers.

Illustrating this point, at the Direct Marketing Association’s 2014 annual conference, some 250 marketers were surveyed by Yes Lifecycle Marketing about their activities.

The results of that survey revealed that more than half of the marketers are using at least six outbound channels to connect with customers. And another 20% use more than ten channels.

Guess what this means? Nearly 30% of these marketers report that they’re managing (or more likely juggling) seven or more technology vendors and service providers as part of their MarComm duties.

More to the point, many marketers are devoting huge chunks of their week just coordinating all of these tech and service providers.

For an unlucky ~20% of the respondents, the time commitment is upwards of 15 hours each week – more than a third of the time that makes up a 40-hour week. (“What’s a 40-hour week in marketing?” one might ask, of course.)

Even for marketers who are using a smaller number of vendors to support their media and communications channel efforts, the involvement of various internal stakeholders is high – more than seven, on average, during the vendor selection process. So the coordination responsibilities just keep adding up.

What this means …

The Yes Lifecycle Marketing Survey found a correlation between the “choreography” demands of managing multiple vendors and the fact that other marketing activities suffer as a result — namely, market strategizing, business operations and customer relationship-building.

And even with those duties getting shorter shrift, the marketers surveyed still complained about having too many vendors to coordinate … significant challenges with properly integrating the various functions … insufficient budgets … and above all, a lack of adequate staffing.

To top it off, the typical tenure of a Chief Marketing Officer at a company isn’t exactly lengthy — ~45 months at last count. It’s enough to make one wonder if a job in marketing is worth it.

The answer to that question can be summed up this way (with credit to Oscar Wilde and apologies for the riff): “The only thing worse than being busy is … not being busy.”

What Social Media is Teaching Us (Again)

March 6, 2011March 7, 2011 Phillip Nones Uncategorized Blogs, Business, Company Organization, Corporate Strategy, Facebook, LinkedIn, marketing, Marketing Management, Marketing Metrics, Marketing Strategy, Metrics, News, Nones, Nones Notes, NonesNotes, Organizational Behavior, Phillip Nones, Sales, Sales Management, Social Marketing, Social Media, Strategic Marketing, Thoughts, Twitter, Weblogs

Social media – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs and all that – burst onto the scene only a few years ago. Because of this, we’re still learning daily how these tools are impacting and influencing attitudes about companies and brands … as well as the propensity for people to buy products and services as a result.

But some aspects are coming into pretty strong focus now. One of the interesting insights I’ve drawn from social media is that it spotlights the “disconnect” that exists between marketing and sales personnel.

This disconnect has existed for decades, of course. In my nearly 35 years in business, I’ve heard a common refrain from sales folks. It goes something like this: “I have no idea what those people in marketing do all day long!”

On the flip side, the marketing pros have a few choice words for the sales personnel as well: “All they ever think about is the next order. Unless it delivers instant hot prospects who are ready to buy immediately, they’re not interested in any of our marketing programs.”

This is why so many B-to-B companies have tried to cross-pollinate between marketing and sales by moving staff back and forth between the two areas.

But what company is inclined to gives up its star sales performers to marketing? What happens more often is that the underperforming sales people are the ones who end up in marketing … where they then achieve only middling success there as well.

Conversely, so many of the best sales performers aren’t “God’s gift to strategic thinking” at all … while the marketing people who are so creative and insightful when thinking about markets are woefully inadequate when it comes to keeping up with a Rolodex® full of dozens of sales contacts.

Another part of the problem is the approach to metrics. Marketing personnel have historically been focused on reaching wider audiences. To a salesperson, things like “creating awareness” and “building a brand” are frustratingly fuzzy. Instead, salespeople focus on individual customers, sales quotas and other quantifiable information – real “bottom line” figures.

Today, social media is bringing all of this into sharper relief. To be most effective, social media demand that marketing and sales personnel work together. It’s no longer possible for the two groups to employ different approaches, different interactions and different metrics for success.

To my view, it’s going to be harder for marketing and communications personnel to get their heads around new expectations for metrics and analyses when compared to the sales folks. There are many new analytical tools to be mastered – and that’s probably a source of fear for many a marketer.

For salespeople, who live and die by facts and figures, this is duck soup by comparison.

And if you really think about social media, it’s about audience (customer) engagement in a direct and personal manner. Who’s been doing that for years? The sales force, of course.

So does it make any sense to “silo” social media activity and content development within the marketing department? Generally speaking, no.

In fact, many sales personnel have already embraced social media activities because they see it as another useful tool to leverage customer engagement. This is an environment they already know well, because they’ve always been in the business of building relationships.

So the times demand that marketing and sales team up as never before. For marketers, that means opening up the social media initiative and structuring it to include sales personnel as well the marketing staff. Redlining these tasks won’t work.

And here’s another idea: Have the marketing staff hang around with the sales force. Put them out there at trade shows and other industry events where they are forced interact with customers and behave like … salespeople!

[This is especially true if a company’s marketing staff comes from collegiate or administrative backgrounds – a common weakness in many mid-sized B-to-B firms where the most lucrative upward career paths take employees through engineering, R&D or sales, not through marketing and communications.]

Social media reminds us, once again, that the key to success in business is “mixing it up” with customers and prospects. We need to make sure we do the same inside our own companies.