Two Seminars, Key Lessons Learnt
August and September were two monumental months for me as a business owner, where after more than two decades in high flying corporate roles, I found myself somewhat vulnerable at times during the events!
It’s not so much as trying to prove myself again as I learnt recently speaking to someone with eons of experience managing their own business. It’s more re-building a different brand than my own personal brand.
Marketing our own company’s brand is sometimes seen as more difficult than marketing another company’s brand. That is because we usually won’t have huge amount of resources, be it time or funds. What we have are usually huge doses of self doubt, especially when we face rejections.
Rejections were aplenty, especially when I was hosting my own exhibition booth at The Business Show Asia and it works both ways - I rejected others and others rejected me! On hindsight now, I see it as more misalignment in objectives and expectations aka the wrong fit. On that, I have learnt to qualify early and quality better.
I relieved the days where I was in a more junior position, setting up events from scratch, pulling up banners, packing gifts to printing tags. But I did it with way more pride now than before because I am now at a place where I truly appreciate the value all the little things can help to contribute to the eventual success of an event. If you don’t take pride in it, it will certainly be apparent to your customers!
Overseeing the planning by myself versus working with others to co-organize are also valuable experiences. Though working collaboratively as a team is nothing new to me and people who have worked with me before often tell me that they appreciate the trust I placed on them. I believe in walking the talk as a leader - we are all in it together and if the going gets tough, we face it together but ultimately, if I can provide the air cover as their leader, I certainly will and should! On this, lessons are aligning expectations to make sure everyone is on the same page.
Preparing for the worse and seeing the rainbow at the end -that’s another valuable lesson learnt as things can and often will go wrong in many ways. What we can do are to manage well what we can predict and make the best of what we cannot control.
All that said, I have thoroughly enjoyed myself and learnt a lot from both events. The highlights are always the interactions with people in person; that’s irreplaceable! The insights exchanged also inspired new ideas and perceptions. It also made me realized that we all don’t need to be absolute experts in every topic that we bring to the seminars - everyone is still learning, exploring, listening and forming their own enhanced observations through the sharing by others.
Next - I’m looking forward to October and November’s series of speaking events - Singapore > Bangkok > Singapore > Dubai > Singapore - Bring it on!
If you’re interested to watch key highlights and takeaways of the panel discussions held during these events, check here and follow our YouTube Channel!
About the Author
Mad About Marketing Consulting
Ally and Advisor for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.
If Marketing is A Stock, How Much Would You Value It?
Engage a marketing team for as little as $1,000 monthly.
You don’t need a CMO; you just need to tap on Gen AI to do your marketing for you.
Start-Ups don’t need a CMO or Experienced Marketing Leader; just hire a fresh graduate or a junior marketer since you as a Founder Can Do Everything!
Some horror stories I have been reading from LinkedIn either through people’s comments, posts or articles. I also had stories shared with me recently when I spoke with some junior marketers who are working for start-ups or micro businesses.
Let me turn this around for a moment and see how it makes you feel, if you are say a CEO, COO, CDO or whatever C-suite person who is likely to be a Founder of the next flashy app or platform or business:
Engage an IT team for as little as $1,000 monthly to develop and maintain the app for you.
We don’t need a CEO/COO/CDO; just hire a fresh graduate or junior sales/operations/digital manager to do your job.
It seems marketing is the single most replaceable or redundant job in any given company.
It also seems everybody and anybody can and knows marketing.
It’s the easiest skill to master in the world of business, sales, HR, IT, Data, operations, finance….the list goes on.
Perhaps it’s a bad encounter with a bad marketer. Or perhaps you actually have zero idea of what marketing can and should be doing for your business.
In any case, I feel sorry for you but as the saying goes, pay peanuts and get monkeys.
Companies need to be realistic and cognizant of the fact that the level of contribution and value of that contribution comes with experience in the field. There is no shortcut to it. Similar to any profession, the more experience the person has, especially across their own field, across the same and/or different industries and even across different countries, the more valuable the contribution.
This is different from say someone who has stayed on in their marketing position in the exact same company and same portfolio for decades and hasn’t learnt anything new, achieved anything new or launched anything new. It’s like a chef cooking the exact same dish year on year and not changing the menu at all - stale.
But to have the unrealistic expectations that a junior marketer should be able to think and act like a seasoned marketer, the shame is on you, not them.
In essence, a good and seasoned marketing leader can add value and provide guidance around:
customer acquisition, retention and sales enablement strategies
customer experience and lifecycle management
market and customer research and user testing needs
omni channel engagement and experience management
insights that can be gathered from customer data as well as interactions with your channels
shaping your product and business proposition, including providing opinions on areas for improvement
These are also tenets of core marketing functions and dependent on the exposure the marketer has had over the years of working across different portfolios, companies or industries.
About the Author
Mad About Marketing Consulting
Ally and Advisor for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.
So You have Won an Award But….
Everyone loves awards, especially reputable ones from renowned associations.
Marketers love our awards for sure as it’s something that most of us probably toiled hard for and spent long hours putting together the campaign strategy behind it. But if you ask the business and start flashing the trophy in front of them, they might just go “erm good but where’s the sales?”.
In such a scenario, before you start conjuring up images of Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire saying “show me the money” and depending on what’s the reality of the connect versus disconnect between your campaign outcomes versus business outcomes, try asking yourself the following questions:
What else did I achieve in reality besides marketing outcomes like engagements, interest and conversions based on people who interacted with the campaign?
What did it really look like in terms of sales demand, leads generated for sales and/or sales opportunities, if not actual sales?
If it looks bad, why is there a disconnect between marketing and sales outcomes? Was it a product proposition problem or marketing positioning problem?
The truth is, marketing awards to me, having being a judge for a few different awards now, should be tagged hand in hand to business outcomes.
Marketers shouldn’t be winning awards for their own vanity but rather, the award is the cherry on top of the cake as a reward for a successful campaign that helped to achieve business outcomes. And these business outcomes in turn helped to solve customer problems and address their needs.
Else, you end up with a flashy trophy but still get hammered for not helping business to create sales demand and opportunities. And guess what, your marketing budget still gets cut at the end of the day as business still sees a disconnect between what marketing does and what business wants. Business would rather spend it on product research and development than marketing awards as such award submissions certainly don’t come cheap!
Marketers should therefore take greater pride in being strategic advisors to the business and work with them to strengthen their product and service proposition. Bring in a neutral perspective of the target customer and make sure it is a proposition that is compelling even to you. Else, no marketing campaign can salvage a bad product proposition.
Then, you can go focus on winning awards and actually take pride in it.
About the Author
Mad About Marketing Consulting
Ally and Advisor for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.
Companies - Stop Launching Mediocre Products, Please.
Just as marketing is sometimes guilty of not going deep enough into the hoods of the true value proposition of what they are promoting on behalf of the company, business is just as guilty of launching mediocre products.
What is considered as a mediocre product? Is there such a thing as a bad product if it can sell?
In my experience, a mediocre product is one that is positioned largely on the following:
being first to market as its pure competitive advantage and nothing else
offering an incentive or price based positioning that can be easily displaced by its competitor who is willing to go lower or offer better
not making a real effort to tailor the products/services based on the needs of your target customers. Instead, you rely on marketing to position it and pretend that it is tailored for their needs when in fact, it is just a generic product/service that is catered for everyone
Based on above, it is telling that if a company focuses purely on quick wins and conversions, they are not looking to build a sustainable solution based product that addresses their customers’ actual needs. They are in it purely to make a quick buck from willing customers and what they usually end up with is a bunch of products/services that they have to keep topping up with more and more incentives/discounts/promotions/fancier taglines or creatives just to outdo their competition. I.e., they realize they don’t really have a truly unique selling point as they didn’t put in enough effort and thinking into developing something that cannot be easily replaced. Such approach will only work if you are the only seller or if the product and service is really hard to develop, thus you are confident most of your competitors are not able to achieve it..
Take for example, if you decide that there is a need currently in the market by for student aftercare services to support working parents who don’t have supportive company policies and flexible working arrangements. If you are offering a mediocre service, you will simply offer say - Free aftercare service for the first 3 months of signing up and 30% off if you sign up now for the next 3 months.
If you want to look at a more sustainable approach to avoid situations where a competitor offers say free aftercare for the first 4 months and 40% off if you sign up now, you will make an effort to find out more the other pain points associated with working parents and their children and try to bundle it into a more holistic “working parents aftercare services package” centered around - aftercare services, guided special out of school curriculum based on their children’s interests, customizable late afternoon snack option to cater for dietary preferences, access to resources for working parents and their children to adjust to such situations etc. Of these, some might be easily replicated but some like the out of school curriculum is not, as that’s unique to your company’s methodology and pedagogy.
It might take more effort and cost more but at least you won’t be caught in a pricing and promotional warfare with your competitors by tapping on your true strengths and unique capabilities. You might even be able to charge more or give less of a discount as you are selling the whole solution that addresses their pain points instead of a single, purely price/discount as-a-value based service/product that is more like a band aid that can be easily torn off and replaced.
The above is just a simple example of looking at why as marketers, we should pride ourselves as being valued business partners to bring the perspective of the customer to the table. Don’t be afraid to ask them hard questions, putting on the customer’s lens to ensure the outcome is a sustainable one, unless it’s part of the strategy to build something that is more seasonal or once-off to capitalize on a specific consumer trend.
About the Author
Mad About Marketing Consulting
Ally for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.
Identifying an Addressable Need
I recently came across an analysis by someone showcasing the success of the oat milk brand called Oatly and how they created a need that led to their success.
I have a slightly different take on Oatly’s success in that they didn’t create a need but rather, they identified an addressable need in the consumer market, developed their product to suit the addressable market and designed their packaging and campaign that speaks to the addressable market.
Why is it addressable and why is it not a need creation in their case?
First of all, looking at the fundamental principles of the hierarchy of needs, oat milk in itself is not new. Oatly was not the one who first came out with Oat milk as an alternative to other plant milk varieties that are not from nuts, legumes or fruits. People don’t need Oatly as yet another oat milk alternative. Even for the use in beverages, especially coffee drinks for example, Oatly is not the first entrant in this market.
If you look at the consumer and fast moving consumer good space. there aren’t that many products that are really needs based in this modern day and age. Ask yourself in all seriously as a consumer, do you really need to have say a burger or a pizza or that soft drink? For such cases, what brands and companies are creating is a want and not so much a need, which makes it a lot harder of course.
How we can take a step further however to see if these wants actually can be addressed at a deeper layer, going into the consumer psyche and how we think, behave and act, perhaps there is an addressable need tagged to that specific want. For example, consumer A, let’s call him Billy, wants to eat pizza because it makes him feel good and why does it make him feel good? It reminded him of his grandma who used to make really nice pizzas for him when she’s still around. It makes him feel safe, warm and loved whenever he thinks about pizza now. The feeling of loved, security and safety is a need and not a want as we all know.
This is where the fundamental need that can be addressed by a company who wants to give their consumers the same warm, fuzzy, safe and feelings of love with their pizzas is more likely to win over consumers and build a sustainable brand versus a company that just serves pizzas to make money from pizza lovers.
In Oatly’s case, they identified an addressable want by consumers who are avid coffee drinkers who might fall into a few categories:
1) those who are lactose intolerant or vegan or just prefer not to take dairy with their coffee but yet prefer not to have black coffee
2) those who in 1) but are allergic to nuts or don’t like the taste and thus have been relying on other plant milks like soy or coconut
3) those falling into 1) and 2) but who don’t quite like the tastes of other current plant milk types available
Looking at the wants and preferences of the consumers, we can also look at what are the underlying needs of the consumers who don’t take dairy and prefer plant milk in general that are being addressed. For example, it might be a feeling of being healthier, which is more basic survival or a feeling that they are doing their part in supporting the rights of animals, which is more altruistic or self actualization.
I find that doing an extensive mapping by going back to basics of what your target consumers want and need helps to better identify what is that addressable need that you as a brand or company can cater for ultimately to form your proposition.
Going back to Oatly’s case, after they have identified the preliminary wants and needs, they would be looking at pain points their consumers are facing based on how, where and when they are consuming plant milk. In this case, oat milk is not new to the market, including in the coffee shops but it is just beginning to make some headwinds. Almond was the first to lay claim and make their presence felt after soy was dominating for a while as the alternative milk for barista brewed coffees. Oatly would have studied this for a while and gotten some feedback from prospective customers who are avid drinkers of coffee paired with plant milk, once they decided this would be a good place to target in terms of their distribution network.
They would need to consider not just the taste of their product when brewed with coffee but the price point as well both on the consumer side and the business side, meaning the cafe owners who will be buying the stocks from them before they developed their barista edition oat milk. If there are already a few other plant milk or early entrant oat milk varieties being supplied, what would be that key differentiator so Oatly can win? They would need to think about product variations to cater for standalone oat milk drinkers versus coffee drinkers who choose plant milk over dairy.
At this point, it wouldn’t just be the packaging. It would be taste, quality, price and ability to retain their flavour or even their flexibility in order quantities, inventory management and payment management, especially for smaller cafes.
This article is just a high level of how I personally like to work with brands as a marketer, on their positioning and campaigns. It’s not meant to be an exhaustive list as there is much more to think about. But for starters, as marketers, we should always go back to the fundamental principles of the consumer psyche, marketing principles, proposition and business viability when working on our campaigns.
About the Author
Mad About Marketing Consulting
Ally for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.
Marketing is not just a change of underwear
Someone once asked me what I do as “a marketing person” in a bank. Too fatigued at that time to give a lengthy explanation, I simply said, “I take a bunch of old products, repackaged them a bit in terms of visuals and tagline, and make them look new”. The person laughed and acknowledged it’s the same for his “marketing people” as well.
The above is partially true for most product marketing efforts and how it’s often applied across industries basically.
For example, Person A wakes up one day and realises he’s been losing out to the hotter guys in the dating scene. He took one look at his wardrobe and his grimy face in the mirror, and decided to go for a makeover with a visit to the hair salon and hip downtown mall. With his trendy new look, he does attract some girls but then these girls just somehow don’t become lasting relationships, much to his exasperation.
Talking to some of his previous relationships, close friends and family members, he finally has an epiphany. He realises that due to his tendency to blow up at the slightest displeasure and having too big an ego to apologise thereafter, many of his relationships have failed to progress into something more serious. This means that regardless of how well-dressed he looks, as long as he doesn’t make an effort to change for the better, he will still likely to be a single, lonely and forlorn bachelor ten years down the road. He will date, yes but he cannot be in a relationship for long. In this situation, Person A can choose to go either way - 1) ignore the gaps and continue with just a physical makeover for short term gains or 2) to really spend time to overcome the gaps for longer term gains.
The above is a very simple way of demonstrating the difference between two different business scenarios - 1) a business that simply sells products by repackaging and/or redesigning on the surface or by throwing freebies to attract customers only to have them churn after a year or two or 2) a business who actually makes an effort to transform the mechanics and/or features of their product or service offering in order to keep up with changing customer needs/demands in order to build longer lasting relationships with them.
Based on the same example, if the business realises what is the real problem with its products and make an effort to actually improve them to better cater to the needs of the same customer base, they will find it easier to start building relationships with them. To put it blindly, it’s not as simple as just changing your underwear.
This improvement actually moves the business from selling just a product to selling a solution that resolves a problem or need for their customers – ahead or on par with its competitors.
Again, as organisations move towards solution-selling, they also increasingly realise how daunting a move this is and that it goes beyond just making changes to its products but the way it operates too. Story for another post.
That said, this doesn’t dispel the need for marketing and promotions. It simply means that businesses should move first from product to solution-selling before it goes out to buy a whole new wardrobe.
Meanwhile, before organisations make this move, most marketers can only continue to “make a bunch of old products look new”. As a self respecting marketer, we should also seek to influence the business positively to move towards solution selling by making consistent effort to engage them in our planning and vice versa. Marketing doesn’t exist on its own but more as an enabler of the business to be that voice to bring their proposition to life.
About the Author
Mad About Marketing Consulting
Ally for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.
Who rules - Preference or Performance Marketing?
Companies who are still keeping two separate team strategies between performance and preference marketing are setting themselves up for longer term failure
Such companies are failing to connect the dots between full funnel marketing and over simplifying the consumer decision making process and mindset.
This is especially in the digital ad space where borders are blurred or non-existent and privacy settings no longer allow for precision targeting the way we desire.
Preference and performance simply should go hand in hand as end day, we don’t simply blow marketing dollars for the sake of it. What’s awareness to someone is consideration to another and conversion to someone else, depending on the decision making journey your customer sits in relation to the product or service and your company.
This is certainly not that new, when I went through the Google certification course back in 2019 but am still surprised that some are only talking about this in recent years.
What’s more shocking is the way some companies are still insisting on measuring marketing returns on investment by not having attribution beyond vanity impressions, page views and clicks on pretext that it’s just for awareness. On the other end of the spectrum is insisting that if a certain ad doesn’t result in immediate conversion, then it’s a failed campaign on pretext it’s for performance.
Whatever happened to looking at the funnel, who you really are trying to target, where in the decision making funnel they are at, how compelling is whatever you are offering, and ensure you are connecting the dots on your messaging in different formats, in order to determine the right metrics to measure at each touchpoint?
Example – this week, you have an ad talking about how xx product will help solve xx issue that customers face today. A few days later, you have another ad referring to the same product promoted on a site that your target customers frequent. A few days later, you serve up another ad that has a tactical offer with a buy by xx date.
Companies who know who they are targeting and who are responding to their ads versus those who aren’t, will create segmented lists that differentiate the two. They will use one for remarketing with differentiated messaging to help catch their target customers along the funnel with the above messaging and offer so they maximize their media budget. This process should ideally be automated.
Another critical thing to do is to try to get target customers to sign up and start a relationship with you, by giving them reason to of course through insights, tips or deals that matter to them, especially critical with the sunsetting of cookies.
This goes hand in hand with understanding their digital footprint so you have a multi-dimensional view of your target customers as real people with interests, preferences and needs, beyond outdated attributes like age.
All in all, companies need to invest in the full funnel and have different measurements for each stage of the funnel.
About the Author
Mad About Marketing Consulting
Ally for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.