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Marketing Week recently quoted advertising guru Sir John Hegarty as saying, “Brands are populated by people who don’t understand the basics of marketing.”
Is he right? And if so, is this the whole story? Simon Ward discusses.
Is Sir John Hegarty right?
Marketing Week quoted advertising guru Sir John Hegarty as saying that brands are “populated by people in thrall to technology” who “don’t understand the basics of marketing.”
The analysis seems a bit harsh.
Yet the argument is not without merit. He goes on to say, “big brand-driving ideas are few and far between”, and in this he makes a fair point.
However, while some of the blame for this may well fall on a lack of understanding in some marketing departments, my experience of dealing with numerous big brands is that the greatest blame must be laid at the door of growing complexity, not poor understanding.
The proliferation of digital channels and calls to connect with consumers across every single one, while guaranteeing compliance and accurately assessing the ROI of each, can leave marketers drowning in admin and processes.
As Sir John says, “creativity is fundamental to business growth”. But how is a marketer to come up with and constantly adapt big ideas when they’re swamped by process?
The sad truth is there are so many other calls on a marketer’s time because others in the C-suite prioritise instant ROI and feedback over pursuing long-term strategies and the much-needed big ideas. Few marketers have the time to prioritise the goals Sir John correctly identifies as being so important.
Unfortunately, with pressure on budgets and the demand for almost 24-hour reporting, things are not likely to change any time soon.
The answer, therefore, has to be to adapt to this changed environment. To find a way of enabling marketers to focus on the big idea without sacrificing the process and reporting that the board and shareholders demand.
The first thing that is required is to split the marketing function into those elements that are fundamental to developing creative strategy and those that are based around the mechanics of procurement, execution and reporting.
The second is to take everything in the latter category and automate and outsource the hell out of those processes so that, as far as possible, they’re removed from the marketer’s desk.
Technology has caused the problem; technology can provide the answer – whether it’s managing the mechanics of campaigns, dealing with procurement, or providing you with real-time campaign reporting via your mobile.When marketers are freed of those burdens, they will have the opportunity to show their mettle – to spend their time driving the brand forward through creativity.
Only when that happens will we truly know whether the fault lies in the dominance of process, or with the marketers themselves.Until next time,
Simon Ward
About Simon Ward
Simon Ward ITG – Simon is the founder and CEO of pioneering technology-led marketing company, Inspired Thinking Group (ITG). ITG delivers best-in-class marketing software, procurement and studio services to dozens of blue-chip clients, including Audi, M&S, KFC, PUMA and Heineken.
Simon Ward SP Group – Prior to ITG, Simon founded SP Digital in 1998, and in 1999 bought SP Print to form SP Group, creating innovative marketing and point of sale displays for some of the world’s best-known retailers, including M&S, Sainsbury’s, Holland & Barrett and Calvin Klein.
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Keep creativity alive in a world of distraction
“Yes, I’m a marketing manager, but really I’m a project manager… I just don’t have the resource to be creative.”
I heard this comment from an audience member at a recent round table event hosted by The Drum, where I was invited to sit on the panel.
The title of the event was “When Marketers are not Marketers”, and joining me at the table were senior marketers from M&S, SABMiller and the IAB.
We all agreed that strong creativity leads to positive results in marketing, but we had to acknowledge that the time marketers have to be creative is severely restricted by the additional admin, procurement and reporting responsibilities that are increasingly piled on them.
The challenge for marketers, as Tina Kataria, SABMiller’s global category manager for agency sourcing, so succinctly put it, is to “keep creativity alive in a world of distraction.”
Improving the value of marketing
And these distractions are multiplying, driven by more digital channels, increasing accountability and ever-rising budgetary pressure. These budgetary pressures can lead to demands for cost cutting, which can be disastrous if not tied to increases in efficiency and improvements in the value of marketing activity.
There can be other fall-out too. As the IAB’s Steve Chester said, “cost-cutting can mean agency margins being squeezed, often leading to bad creative and driving down value.”
Adding to these issues, traditional notions of customer engagement and loyalty have been blown out of the water.“Customers are indifferent,” said fellow panellist Richard Jones, head of design and production at M&S. “That is the job marketing has to deal with.”
Overcoming this indifference and building brand engagement means devoting more time to creative strategy and customer engagement, not less. And this means reclaiming time and resource for creative thinking by reducing the admin burden.
So that’s the conundrum we discussed at length: how to increase creativity in the face of demands for greater efficiency and value, and the avalanche of admin and process. It’s a problem I encounter all the time, and fortunately it does have a solution.
Technology is key
Many of the time-consuming tasks that are taking marketers away from addressing the urgent needs of creatively encouraging customer engagement – managing campaigns, suppliers, assets, briefing, approvals – can be handed over to technology.
The panel had a very interesting discussion on the difference between those in marketing who understand the value of technology and those who don’t.
Technology impacts everyone in business, because it’s where the savings lie. The right marketing automation achieves the double hit of freeing up your time to focus on creativity – most likely why you got into the job in the first place – and delivering those cost savings demanded by the board.
Joined-up marketing
A joined-up approach to marketing operations that embraces technology can deliver hard savings through better and more transparent briefings and approvals, reducing reworks and delivery time.
It can provide improved adherence to CPAs, enabling you to do more in the time available, as well as providing the obvious major time and efficiency improvements by banishing spreadsheets and manual ways of working.You’ll see a reduction in emails for each job, and savings from reduced reliance on freelance resource.
Efficient automated workflows give you the extra time you need to properly plan and develop strategy, while the visibility technology can provide of your entire operation enables you to measure campaign effectiveness to facilitate better planning and budget allocation.
We concluded that there are, in effect, two streams to marketing: ideas-driven marketing and data-driven marketing.
The first relies on good people with inspirational ideas, good instincts and, crucially, the time required to develop creative strategies and put them into effect.
The second provides the operation efficiency, value and reporting required, but it is time-consuming unless supported by the right technology – technology that frees up time for the ideas-driven marketing that can overcome consumer indifference.
Perhaps when all companies take this approach, we’ll be able to come back to the Drum for an event entitled “When Marketers ARE Marketers”. I look forward to the day.
Until next time…
Simon Ward
You can read The Drum’s write up of the event.
About Simon Ward
Simon Ward ITG – Simon is the founder and CEO of pioneering technology-led marketing company, Inspired Thinking Group (ITG). ITG delivers best-in-class marketing software, procurement and studio services to dozens of blue-chip clients, including Audi, M&S, KFC, PUMA and Heineken.
Simon Ward SP Group – Prior to ITG, Simon founded SP Digital in 1998, and in 1999 bought SP Print to form SP Group, creating innovative marketing and point of sale displays for some of the world’s best-known retailers, including M&S, Sainsbury’s, Holland & Barrett and Calvin Klein.