The Biggest Marketing Challenges for 2012: How Can You Keep Your Job?
December 5, 2011 by Kevin Michael Gray
The upcoming year is full of potential, mystery, and change. My wife has been training for a half marathon and one thing about marathon's is that it is not how you start that matters but rather how you finish. Today's featured article comes from AdAge.com and discusses the necessity to maintain speed (and progress) this upcoming year in order to ensure fiscal success. What are your thoughts? Do you have anything you would like to add? We would love to hear from you. Tweet about it at @seedingideas
I'm talking about making big changes, though not the obvious ones -- like going for that kooky social campaign that you rejected this year because it didn't connect to anything tangible in our physical universe. Your agency can't give you a bigger creative idea that'll change the game, since using big ideas isn't a game-changer anymore but standard operating procedure. I don't think you can up the ante on challenging your fellow C-suiters to understand more (or complain less) about how hard you work to perpetuate the brand.
We marketing types live in a happy bubble in which no campaign ever fails (they just succeed differently), and we present them to one another, repeat them in different times, ways and places, and then present them to one another to copy again. Remember that nobody is sharing the exact guts of what really worked anyway (that's like Coke publishing its formula), so whatever you do will be an imperfect simulacra of the success you're hoping to emulate. So resolve to break free from this echo chamber: Ruthlessly deconstruct "successful" campaigns so you really understand what happened, or what didn't. Study what your competition didn't do, and why. Challenge your agency to get explicit on why an idea is uniquely relevant to your brand, and not to the last two clients to whom they tried to sell it, so when it's time for you to sell it internally, you'll know it's truly yours. And that it has a chance of being truly new.
Scientists. Historians. Theologians. The marketing industry is particularly parochial, and our conceptual inputs are notoriously marketing-ified or otherwise abstracted by our fellow liberal arts types. We need to tap into primary resources, not the interpreters' versions, and learn more about what we know about large things, like the cosmos, and little things, like the way we human beings work. Check into the maddening recurrence of most historical dreams and nightmares, and what they can tell us about what we're dealing with today. Dare yourselves and your teams to explore and discuss religion, which stands as the most consistently compelling model for community and relationship marketing ever created (yet we're usually too uncomfortable to discuss it from these angles). When was the last time you asked a nonmarketer -- a real nonmarketer, not a regular member of our food chain of idea creation -- to present at a meeting, or simply to talk to you? The C-suite will take you far more seriously if you stop quoting marketers as support for your marketing. Do yourself a favor and stop reading business books exclusively, too.?
Throw down the towel and swear allegiance to sales.
Don't just use PC language and then back it up with those convoluted graphs that show how counting laughs generated by a YouTube video lead to nonbinding clicks on a "more info" button on your company's website. Admit that real sales matter, really, and that a sale constitutes a customer giving your company money, which makes everything else that happens -- i.e., everything you do -- nothing more than prelude and prompt. Explore how you can shift your metrics from measuring intangibles of brand to enabling behaviors that allow the business to enact transactions better, faster and more frequently. In other words, start finding the brand in the business, rather than telling the business to share your illuminated vision of the brand (which they simply cannot see). The brand isn't a qualitative measure of something atmospheric, but rather the aggregate of the things for which your customers pay money, and if you allow this sword to hang over your head the way it does everyone else with whom you work, instantaneously you'll have earned new credibility and camaraderie.
