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.
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.