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.
Everyone Loves Some Data But…
The million dollar question is - what exactly do you want to get out of the data?
Everyone has been talking about data for a good decade or so and depending on your level of data maturity, you are either still trying to find where are all of your data sources are located or you are now trying to monetize the insights gathered from your data.
Woe to you if you’re in the former bucket but no surprise many organizations, especially non digital native ones are still sadly in this bucket. Wow to you if you’re in the latter bucket, so what can you do to monetize it?
Customer data platforms, data management platforms and customer relationship management platforms suddenly became the talk of town thanks to Google’s flippant stance on third party cookies, that kept rolling back and back. Companies realized their archaic customer data collection methods and storage methods (often just in excel spreadsheets (horrors!)) are not quite cutting it.
Some are even confusing the whole customer data terminology and what it means when we talk about cookies, first party data, third party data and personal information level data. Some have all but sitting in silos or disconnected platforms that don’t talk to each other while others have none (more horrors!).
Some used to think a good data visualization and analytical tool is the holy grail to get all the answers they need by simply plugging it onto of their so-called data sources. But they soon wonder - how to plug, what to plug, where to plug and why can’t it just be plugged and played?!
Things like:
is the data clean, updated or accurate?
is the data in the format that is even retrievable., extractable or readable?
do you even have the data sitting where you thought is sitting?
is your data even categorized in the logic, classification and format that is aligned with your decision-making algorithms?
million dollar question - what exactly do you want to get out of the data? What is the truth that you’re after?
If these were not considered before your so-called plug and play approach, then you get a ton of data yes and a ton of outputs yet but hardly any useful insights. You get more of what we call, data outputs in a format that looks like you just downloaded a gigantic excel spreadsheet or a bunch of fancy looking graphs to make you feel good about some visually appealing data formatted in a presentable manner
E.g. you might see things like:
xx customer transactions performed over xx period
xx customer spent over xx period
That is still not data insights, it’s just data outputs telling you how many transactions and spent over a certain period of time. What are you going to do with that without other insights around:
who are these customers in terms of their interests and life stage needs and what is the co-relation between this and what they are spending versus not spending on?
what did they exactly spend on and why that might be the case?
what are their other needs and what is the possibility for that?
what else have they spent on and why that might be the case?
are they spending more or less on the same products/period and why that might be the case?
The difference as you can see is in terms of the why and the co-relation between the transactional data and the rationale behind it.
We first need to know what it is that we want to see and how that will help us to better understand our customers’ behavior or potential to engage more with us. It helps to have these in mind, and then work backwards to derive what we then need to have in terms of data types and sources in order to arrive at the desired insights.
It’s equivalent to knowing what is that treasure you’re seeking for so you know which location, treasure map, equipment, skills, knowledge and coordinates to get there.
So, do you know the treasure you’re after?
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.
Are You Selling a Product or a Solution?
Brand purpose and value creation are two things that go hand in hand for a successful and sustainable business. A business does not sustain for long, based purely on the sole purpose of making money, instead of solving problems.
The former can capture a market quickly in the short term to capitalize on a specific trend or lowballing the competition with an attractive pricing or promotional incentive, but the latter will help the business with real customer value creation.
This is easier said than done of course, similar to carving out your brand purpose and why customers should care about you. Actually, they don’t and they don’t have to. They care about themselves and the value you bring to them, which in turn is also why your brand purpose is relevant to their needs and/or wants.
Many brands simply talk too much about themselves and how good they are. This is passe and no one cares, really. Your customers want to know why you are good for them. Period.
Many brands are also simply selling a product and it’s obvious when they just call out the product’s features but not their intrinsic benefits for their customers and how it solves their problems.
E.g. - if you are a tire company:
if you’re selling a product, you might say things like - we sell tires for your cars. Our tires are made of quality rubber made to last. Buy now for xx% discount for a limited time period.
If you’re selling a solution, you might say things like - we are the reason mummy and daddy can drive home safe during wet weather or we can save you up to xx% in annual cost since our wheels are made to last.
The above is just a generic example with the second point highlighting potential customer pain points around:
concerns with road safety and enhanced protection against wet weather road conditions where cars are more likely to skid and get into accidents
concerns with costs in maintaining their cars and saving them the hassle of having to swap out their tires too often
There could be more pain points thus it’s critical to first understand the problem you are trying to solve for on behalf of your target customers. Selling a product means they are solving your problem instead by lining your coffers but you are simply enticing them for the short term to get a quick purchase. It doesn’t always work for the discerning customer and your competition can easily out-do you with a better discount.
When you move on to think about value creation and solution selling, it changes the narrative and you become 100% focused on addressing your customers’ needs. You start thinking broader as well what else you can add to your slew of products and services that can more holistically address their pain points.
It’s not as simply as bundling a bunch of products and calling it a fancy name as that is ultimately still product pushing; worse, it’s pushing a bunch of products now that might not even be what they want or need.
It involves insights from customers and non customers. It includes consumer trends, their purchasing behaviour, feedback and proactive research to really tease out useful insights. It’s not a bunch of your internal stakeholders sitting down and narrating what they think. It requires empathy as well as a genuine interest in consumer behaviour.
So, are you selling a product or a solution?
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.