For The Future Indicative, Ep 2 Part 2
Transcript
ALEX EFFGEN
Welcome to the Future Indicative: a podcast on the trends, technologies, personalities, and narratives of business. My name is Alex Effgen, and today’s topic is Marketing.
MEGAN HEUER
“Operationally excellent and emotionally resonant—sticks in my head as a way to think about the promise of marketing. Which is to say, you have to be both efficient and brilliant. And those two things are really hard to put together.
It’s a little bit of lightning in a bottle, but understanding all the science behind how the lightning got in the bottle in the first place, and knowing what to do with it once it’s there.”
ALEX EFFGEN
That was Megan Heuer, Principal at Heuer Advisors, and previously, she was my one and only CMO. We’ll need to define that c-suite acronym in this episode, and get a handle on marketing, as I’m a stranger here myself. Who am I? Alex Effgen. And what do I do? Marketing, I guess. That’s the reason why we’re covering it in this second episode.
To be honest and shame the Devil, I haven’t viewed myself as a marketer. Yes, The Future Indicative is brought to you by Indicate Marketing. It’s in the name of the company for crying out loud!
I guess it depends on your definition of marketing. Mark Twain once wrote in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, “Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.” That’s about where I started when my previous company asked me to become Director of Content Marketing. Content I was good to produce. But marketing?
Thankfully they gave me a CMO to help figure it out, and I turn to her now to tell me what it is.
MEGAN HEUER
“When I just looked up what is the definition of marketing–and I think this shows you the difference between a definition and what great could look like–The activity or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising.
With all due respect, that’s a terrible definition.”
ALEX EFFGEN
I agree. What else ya got?
MEGAN HEUER
“...then I went a little further and I said, What’s the best definition of marketing? Just for fun.
And it said, The best definition of marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes—right there, you’ve lost me—for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. Oh, dear.
If that is what people think it is you’re supposed to be doing, I’m not surprised that you don’t get to do it for very long in any one place…CMO tenure is less than two years—it’s actually 18 months according to the latest data that I saw. One, it’s a lot, but two, gosh, that’s pretty generic. It’s not really saying anything about what it’s supposed to bring to the business, and the way that it’s going to have influence on the things that others in the business care about. That is inherently one of the challenges of great marketing: How do you persuade and prove to others that what you’re doing has meaning inside of a business, and that it is truly impacting the metrics that CEOs, boards and, dare I say, customers actually care about.
ALEX EFFGEN
I’m aligning The Future Indicative to four cardinal points. For a business to be in business, you need to:
SPECIALIZE: What is this?
SELL: Who needs this?
SECURE: What can disrupt this?
SCALE: How do we expand this?
Every business must address these four points, both to the greater world, and within its internal structures. Like a geometric fractal, you need to see the shape of the business in any larger or smaller part when magnified or reduced to the same size. So for a business to SPECIALIZE, its organized parts must also specialize, to reflect the overall business. Let’s go back to Meg’s opening statement about being “operationally excellent and emotionally resonant.” How does she define great marketing?
MEGAN HEUER
“Great marketing elevates your brand, activates your influencers, empowers your sellers, informs innovation, fascinates customers, and proves its impact. And marketing does this by being operationally excellent and emotionally resonant.”
ALEX EFFGEN
Meg mentioned the need for great marketing to understand the science behind how the lightning got in the bottle in the first place, and knowing what to do with it once it was there. But that’s not just marketing, that’s understanding the market. And that’s why her title of CMO did not mean “Chief Marketing Officer,” but “Chief Market Officer.”
I’m going to quote Mark Twain again: “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter–it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
If we relegate marketing to vanity metrics and only the tools of marketing, then we lose the value of what marketing provides to the four S in the word business. We lose the market in marketing.
MEGAN HEUER
“There’s another interesting article about the death of the craft beer industry and that it kind of did it to itself. Everyone abandoned the big beer brands for these small beer brands, that started really battling to outdo themselves in terms of the things that they thought people wanted: quirky labels, really high alcohol content, very, very strong flavors.
But they kind of look the same, and end up almost tasting the same too. And as a result, you’ve turned people off of beer altogether, and people are drinking a lot less of it. And more breweries closed last year than opened. And I think that is a story about what marketing has done to itself in B2B.
We’ve lost sight of the things that should have been underneath that were real. Things like trust, and the actual impact of the product, and the value of the community around it, all of those things got a little bit lost in the mechanics of marketing. And we’re now seeing a moment where companies are starting to realize that those were always the most important things.
We need to go back to thinking about, How do we build things that people need and that people want and that bring them some sort of value? Rather than: How do we market our way to success, or sell our way to success, or automate or AI our way to success?”
ALEX EFFGEN
Marketing is an investment in business. A possible cost center, it often needs to prove the value it provides to the organization. But investing it in understanding the market, the clients, their needs, and the value the company brings to those clients and that market, means you’re investing in revenue generation by product invigoration.
MEGAN HEUER
“Marketing can be the canary in the coal mine. They can be the ones that say, Hey, people are losing interest. They are not engaging with things that they used to engage with. They are not finding us the same ways. The way they’re looking for information has changed. The things that they tell us they value has changed.
They can be at the forefront of understanding their markets, but the people that need to do something about it may well be in product. May well be on the rest of the executive team. May well be in finance. May be on your board or maybe your investors. Those people need to fundamentally understand that a lot of dynamics in markets right now are not what we think they are.
It’s a whole different ballgame. Everyone understanding how their markets work, and how their buyers think, and what they need, and using that to inform all of your decisions is going to become even more critical because it’s too easy to ignore things that don’t matter.”
ALEX EFFGEN
In order to SELL something, you need to know who’s willing to buy it. But great marketing also knows the person trying to sell it.
MEGAN HEUER
“I worked with a salesperson who said something I will never forget, and he said, ‘Basically, think about my life as I am always on a 30-day performance plan. I am only as good as whatever the last reporting period of my performance is.’
And when I thought about that, and you contrast that with marketing where sometimes they don’t even really have goals that are super clear and tied to a huge percentage of their pay and whether or not they’re going to stay employed.
Sales operates under a level of pressure that most other functions in the business don’t. And I think we can learn from that because that means they are better able really than any other team in the company to cut through the nonsense, and think about what matters and figure out what works.
When marketing starts to get frustrated with sellers and say, ‘Well, they’re not following up with my leads or they’re not doing this, or they’re not helping with that.’
Well, why not? If what you are offering to them, for whatever reason, isn’t clearly linked to the outcomes that they are required to deliver, you need to find out why, and understand what it would take to be a better help to them.
The piece of the puzzle that you can bring to the table too is saying, ‘I want to know what my sellers say. And I need to know what my customers are saying.’ And knowing those two things will really help you have a clear picture of the kinds of ways that marketing can help.”
ALEX EFFGEN
Of course, the entire puzzle must show the picture of value. If the value is not clear, then you’ll never know how the pieces fit. And don’t get me started on a puzzle missing some pieces.
MEGAN HEUER
“...what you really want to think about is, Am I building something that will help, that will do something useful, that actually works when they put it in their hand or look at it or otherwise interact with it? Am I doing it in a way that really drives people to want to do something? That drives them to want to take action?
And if your business isn’t doing that, your marketing certainly can’t, but I see a lot of marketing trying very hard to make up for things that aren’t present in a business—those fundamentals not being there but marketing either assuming they can, or being told they should be able to, overcome that lack of value.
So I think the idea of value, really it goes back to: Are you creating something that has a meaning that is useful? That will do something people care about? And if the answer to that is no or maybe, you’re on the wrong track.”
ALEX EFFGEN
Thank you for joining us on Part 1 of The Future Indicative’s Marketing episode. In Part 2 we’ll explore how marketing can connect to a company’s Finance, and the role AI should play when scaling creativity.
While opinions expressed are solely our own, we’d gladly connect with you on any of the topics presented for further discussion. And if you’ve heard something you like, then please spread the word. Tell them why subscribing to IndicateMarketing.com made your day better. We promise to keep showing how right you are. On behalf of Indicate Marketing, I’m Alex Effgen. And we appreciate your time.
