MirrorWave was a sponsor at the recent 2018 CMO Summit on the Gold Coast, and this short summary is from the Chairperson’s closing remarks.
Here are 10 key strategic outtakes that all CMOs should consider:
- The conference started off with the flamboyant Professor Ritson from Melbourne Business School saying that “Marketers are shit” – and went further to explain why that was. His view is that marketers tend to be too complicated – simple solutions are required and we must get the foundations right. 80% of marketers surveyed didn’t think building brand was a main priority- sales was. Marketers are obsessed with selling not marketing. The problem with that is that we then suffer from “short termism” due to a lack of strategy – and the strategies must be simple
- It goes without saying that we should learn as much as we can about our customers and understand their behaviours – whilst everyone is doing research in one form or another, not everyone is effectively bringing the voice of the customer into the organisation, in the customer’s language. The opportunity is lost to challenge our organisations to respond to it positively.
- Be careful about using demographics and instead think customer typologies (e.g. where they are in the sales funnel, their customer ‘personality’), attitudes and buying behaviour. e. what are the psychographic characteristics rather than the demographic characteristics of your customers. Diagnosis is key (qual and quant). Professor Ritson asks “Why are you trying to sell when you know too little about these customers?”
- Create the best experiences we can right now and then work hard on consistently improving it. A 1% better experience every day is a good aim, rather than taking a whole lot of time to develop a killer experience from the start
- It’s too easy for marketers to focus too much on the silver bullets (like AI, blockchain and bitcoin) at the expense of developing a simple strategy, which is at the heart of marketing. Try putting it in a sentence on one page with particular emphasis on positioning our brand to our audience. Be bold and brave in everything we do
- There’s too much noise about traditional channels dying. So let’s stop debating which channels are the best, the most effective campaigns span multiple channels. We need to open as many channels as we can and segment our messaging across those channels
- The focus on digital marketing is too isolated. Digital and marketing shouldn’t be separate – it’s all marketing and all our marketing team members should understand digital
- Creative needs to be consistent over time. We’re seeing our creative outputs all the time so it’s easy for us to get bored with it. Trouble is the market doesn’t see it nearly so often, and customers need repetition
- Marketers are being forced to be short term and there’s too little commitment to the long term. Our short-term activation should build brands long term. In terms of spend, the golden rule is 60% should go to long term and 40% to short term
- Do more for less. Show discipline with dollars and especially work on “zero based budgets” – plan and show the expected ROI so that the strategy, tactics and results pay for themselves
At MirrorWave, we believe listening and responding is a leadership issue which must bring demonstrable business outcomes. We look at this in more detail in our Four Ways to Profit from Listening and Responding whitepaper, including how to:
- Avoid getting blindsided
- Be more customer orientated
- Better align stakeholders with strategy
- Get more hardnosed with your listening and responding
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