Is the Marketing industry serious about growth?
Is the Marketing industry serious about growth?
We need to speak in hard metrics, not noisy creativity
The best Marketers never forget why they have a job.
As far as the outside world is concerned, these people spend all their time either materially affecting the growth of a business, or communicating the importance of that growth to everyone around them. Of course, in closed circles, they geek out on the details and the craft of Marketing. But to the people holding the pursestrings: it’s all about hard metrics.
The worst Marketers bemoan the fact they're not seen as a strategic growth driver of their business, yet spend their time, energy and attention on initiatives that don't seriously or demonstrably drive those hard growth metrics for the business in question.
What it seems many folks care about - and these will be the folks who don't get seen favourably by CEOs/CFOs - are the following:
Getting their promotion featured in Campaign to be able to share it with their friends and arch-nemesis former colleagues.
Winning an award to put it on their LinkedIn and get likes from people who aren't their customers.
Taking a pop shot at another Marketer to get some buzz on WhatsApp groups going.
The best Marketers I've seen talk about little but:
Accelerating opportunity creation for the sales team (B2B)
Winning market share through improved salience (B2C)
Improving candidate acceptance rates because of stronger employer branding (all businesses)
And ultimately, just making net revenue go up and to the right…
After a week at the Cannes Lions festival, it would seem that many in Marketing have forgotten that they belong to the commercial, money-making function of their company. When they forget who their real master is (the master of coin, a.k.a the CFO) then they’re not being serious about doing their job.
There’s a whole post to be written about why behaviour has tilted towards the hot air and noise that bloats the industry, but I’m more interested in how we course correct and turn more folks into the best Marketers. What does it look like to take back the script?
The good news is that it’s quite simple. All we have to do is rid ourselves of this cult of creativity.
What I mean by that is not to give up on being creative. Of course not. Absolutely, being creative and original gives you a better shot at that, but it’s not sufficient to treat it as the goal.
What’s clear though is that, for many, creativity has become the end rather than the means to the end. The primary job of a Marketer is to win more mental availability in more buying situations, because that means people buy more product, and the company makes more money, gains more share, and then can even raise prices thanks to monopolistic power.
The industry seems reluctant to talk about this as the primary job.
For instance, the Michael CeraVe ad has gotten a lot of hype in the Marketing industry (and it’s super creative, no doubt!) but rather than talking about how genius the idea was (which is what everyone does), we should be talking about how CeraVe is financially booming as a result. We should be talking about how happy the CMO must have made the CFO.
For every minute we spend talking to non-Marketers about the “creative process”, we lose a minute talking about gross margin, net sales, and the stuff that people who control budget care about. Yes, by any measure, creativity is a clear multiplier for growth, but it’s the growth part that matters.
This network interrupt between the creative action and the resulting “so what” - which is more product being sold for more money - has to be fixed.
If Marketers want to be taken seriously, then they have to talk in numbers to the outside world, even if they want to talk shop to folks inside the bubble; long live Cannes Lions! The best ones do this already, but it’s high time for everyone to get serious.