Experiences- the 7th Era of Marketing

by Robert Rose

  And this must happen despite existing or future channels. In short, marketing departments must implement new organizational changes that meet the fast-changing needs of customer empowerment and the need for the organization to orchestrate the vast amounts of content it produces.

  The description of value is relatively well understood. There is no doubt that marketing departments are producing exponentially MORE content than ever before to describe the value of their products and services. It’s the CREATION of valuable experiences and content that is the new muscle for most organizations—one that we hope to exercise and develop a bit with this book.

  Ultimately, these three arguments explain why everything must change about how we go to market. But this isn’t a new prescription. Sixty years ago, during the Marketing Department Era, Peter Drucker wrote:

  “The purpose of business is to create a customer. The business enterprise has two and only two functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results. All the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.”

  This is just as relevant today as it was back then. Yet somewhere along the way, in one of the eras, this idea got lost. Today, it’s time for marketers to claim it back. Marketing can be the distinguishing function of the business, but only if its goal is to continually evolve customers.

  Marketing has to be built in order to create value, not just describe it. We’re classically trained as marketers to describe value across the four P’s. Now, we must do more by creating value using both content AND experiences.

  As we said earlier, it’s not enough for brands to just act like media companies. They must become media companies that develop and delight audiences continually. As media companies, brands engage customers through every aspect of the marketing funnel:

  • From their first awareness of the product, service, or brand promise

  • Through their nurturing and decision-making process

  • To when they become customers

  • To when they become loyal, up-sold, cross-sold, and ultimately evangelistic about subscribing to our brand approach.

  Most marketing departments in large enterprises still operate either in the Relationship or Marketing Department Era. In some companies, marketing is a service organization that views the sales department as a “customer” and exists simply to support sales with the materials they need. Even worse, in some companies, marketing is an annoyance that just creates pretty brochures while the “important work” happens elsewhere. In some companies, content (and the creation of it) is seen simply as busy work for marketing when there are no brochures to produce. For many, this won’t change and their inaction will be fundamental in their demise.

  But some companies are, indeed, changing. At Kraft, for example, content-driven experiences fuel the creation of more effective advertising. Kraft understands its customers at an unprecedented level, drawing out more and more insight into their preferences, behavior, and how to delight them.

  For other companies, like marketing automation software company HubSpot, content creation and publishing are as important as product development. Dharmesh Shah, co-founder and CTO of HubSpot, has been quoted as saying, “Content is as important as code.”

  In this new era of marketing, unique, impactful, differentiating content-driven experiences will become as important as product development. Successful marketers will adapt and change in a constantly evolving media operation that focuses on creating delightful experiences to inform, entertain, engage, and evolve the customer.

  Welcome to the seventh era of marketing—Experiences.

  KEY CONCEPTS IN THIS CHAPTER

  • Most marketing textbooks agree that the development of marketing, as a process, occurred over five eras covering roughly 125 years, with each era spanning approximately 20 to 30 years each. A sixth era of marketing, the Relationship Era, is commonly acknowledged (though not in all university textbooks) to be the current era, and began in the late 1990s. During the:

  Trade Era—the focus was on bringing surplus goods to market.

  Production Era—a company’s ability to mass-produce products became a differentiator.

  Sales Era—marketers concentrated on persuasive language and price to sell products.

  Marketing Department Era—marketers focused on the four P’s (product, place, price, and promotion) and tried to differentiate by making products “aspirational” and “desirable.”

  Marketing Company Era—products were a piece of a larger solution that companies offered.

  Relationship Era—companies developed one-to-one and deeper relationships with customers through more relevant communications.

  • We contend that we are moving into a seventh era of marketing, called Experiences. This is based on three fundamental arguments:

  The customer relationship is more complicated than ever. The Internet has fundamentally shifted customer expectations about their relationships with brands, making those relationships more complex and delicate than ever.

  The democratization of content means that in addition to our competitors, everyone who creates, shares, and publishes content competes for our customer’s attention.

  The adaptation of the marketing department in the business is providing an opportunity for companies to differentiate through content. But this means that marketing must be more strategic, and take a more holistic view of the entire customer experience.

  ENDNOTES

  19 http://www.deloitte.com/view/en_US/us/press/Press-Releases/e051ee4e0e395410VgnVCM1000003256f70aRCRD.htm

  20 http://www.salon.com/2000/05/03/super_ads/

  21 Rogers, Don and Peppers, Martha. The One to One Manager: Real-World Lessons in Customer Relationship Management. Crown Business, 2002.

  22 https://www.lendingclub.com/info/statistics.action

  23 http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2014/09/24/disruption-from-the-collaborative-economy/

  24 http://www.agorapulse.com/blog/content-marketing-strategy-joe-pulizzi

  “We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious…and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” | Walt Disney

  Did you know that the chief marketing officer (CMO) is a modern invention? Just five years ago, only 23 of the Fortune 100 companies even had a CMO as the head of marketing.25 Compare that to the title of CIO, a function that has been around since the early 1980s. As computers made their first appearances on the desktops of modern businesses, executives quickly recognized the CIO as an overall business strategist.

  The CMO title itself seems mostly to be an invention that grew out of the mid- to late-1990s and the dot-com exuberance that kicked off the Relationship Era. Many of the new marketers that joined these startup technology and media companies gave themselves this title. In fact, you might argue that it was the dot-com era that relaunched the idea of “marketing as business strategist.” Up until that time, the marketing function solely focused on generating demand for products. The resulting implosion in the early 2000s is something that the practice is still living down. As we mentioned in the previous chapter, walk into any engineering-driven technology company and the scorn that older engineers have for marketing “weasels” can be palpable.

  But, arguably more than any other business function, both marketing and technology have changed the go-to-market approach for every single business. From the marketing perspective, the challenge in connecting with customers is harder and more competitive than ever. As a result, the required strategic vision and tactical skill sets differ dramatically from what was required just a few years ago.

  Social media, the empowerment of customers, and the demand for corporate transparency are redefining brands and threatening the control (if control even exists any longer) of brand messaging. If you think about who does what within today’s business, marketing and sales serve as “promise makers” of customer experiences, and the rest of the employees serve as “promise keepers.
” The promise keepers have influence over whether customers believe we have kept our promises or not. Therefore, as marketers, we have to expand the scope of what we do and whom we influence. But, we also must make sure that we align internally and externally.

  In short: it’s no longer good enough for marketers to simply generate leads to our sales people, foot traffic to our stores, or visitors to our ecommerce site.

  MARKETING’S ROLE IS MUCH MORE CRITICAL AND MUST:

  1. Evolve a customer from the first time we meet him or her

  2. Turn curious browsers into engaged prospects

  3. Turn engaged prospects into qualified buyers

  4. Turn qualified buyers into satisfied customers

  5. Ultimately, turn satisfied customers into loyal brand subscribers.

  If we don’t deliver on these five critical roles, we risk the financial consequences of confused, disappointed, and frustrated customers.

  THE NEW MARKETER: EXPERIENCE CREATOR INSIDE AND OUT

  For the last decade, people have talked about changing buyer behavior. Yet, little has changed in the marketing department’s view of our role in creating customer experiences. We’re the people who should orchestrate the entire customer journey—creating the experiences that companies have with customers and the employees who serve them—but we don’t.

  We intellectually understand that the days are gone when marketing simply served as a brand steward (or cop, depending on your point of view), created fluffy awareness campaigns, and held events. Now, beyond the legacy functions of making every communication effective for selling, marketing must help lead the transformation of how business is done. But, we must do more than just intuitively understand this transformation because it requires marketers—from CMOs to young professionals—to actually develop new competencies and mindsets to thrive as leaders in new and expanded roles.

  The changes in buyer behavior have forced changes in how we think and act as marketers. Those marketers who thrive on uncertainty feel like kids on summer vacation, leaping at the variety of opportunities, ideas, and inspiration. Apprehensive marketers hold onto traditional practices, thinking that if they ignore the disruption, they won’t have to address it. Fear of the unknown freezes their openness. In between are those just trying to keep their heads above water, or searching for “permission” from their C-suite to try something more strategic. Yes, we marketers still yearn for influence within our organizations and scrape for dollars and resources. But, it’s a catch-22. We have to prove ROI on every investment we make and continually push for the value we think we deliver, while we beg for the power to innovate to do just that.

  It’s time to step forward and assert our authority. In order to gain influence and earn our seat at the “big kid” strategy table, we need to quit thinking like marketers and transition into becoming customer experience leaders who understand the view and strategy of the entire organization; because, if we continue to limit our role to one of “mere” communication, or as a “service agency” to sales, we won’t be able to transform organizations or the way marketing operates within them.

  Research by The Fournaise Marketing Group found that 73% of CEOs think marketing lacks credibility. In contrast, 69% of marketers think their strategies and campaigns have an impact—they just don’t know how to prove it.26 They aren’t equipped to have a marketing conversation in the context of what impact they can have on business performance. Much of this disconnect between marketing and CEOs derives from marketers not understanding the strategic and leadership roles we must take on.

  This struggle doesn’t apply purely to marketers in the trenches. In its research report, “The Transformative CMO,” The Korn Ferry Institute points out that to become “transformative,” marketing executives must understand how the marketing function intertwines with every other function within the company.27 To be successful, these executives need to drive enterprise-wide change in an increasingly complex and unpredictable business environment. Take Kathy Button Bell, CMO of Emerson. In her position, she has infused marketing’s role into that of human resources, product development, IT, and customer service. She sees her role as building collaboration across the enterprise and simplifying how the business operates. To do that successfully, she points out the need for marketers to get exposure to other functions and understand how they all work together.

  “Our biggest trend for 2014 was the elevation of marketing,” said Button Bell. “It’s changing, and we’re doing things that aren’t traditional for the role of marketing. We’re responsible for the integration of external and internal conversations. We focus on empowering customers. The only way to drive customer experiences is to drive integration across the enterprise. And the only way for marketers to do that is to understand the business, and then simplify it. Everything we do at Emerson is about simplification.”28

  LIVING IN BETA

  Here’s something to consider. Analytics, by its very nature, means we are looking in the rear view mirror to see where we are going. So, while it’s great to have context of where we’ve been, and learn from our failures and successes, we’re also charting new roads here. By the time we’ve witnessed, experienced, and documented a best practice, our customers have often moved on. Our nemesis isn’t our perceived competitors—it’s our customers’ short attention spans. In order to think creatively about how we capture and keep their attention, we have to think differently about the role we have within our organizations.

  Modern marketers struggle with incredible change, but the pressure to do so is only getting greater. Recently, Forrester Research and the Business Marketing Association released findings about the expanding role of marketing. Ninety-seven percent of marketers said they expect the pace of change in marketing to accelerate, and 76% felt their leadership evaluates success or failure more rapidly than ever before. Other findings included the following:

  • 21% of marketers say the skills for which they were hired are now obsolete

  • 97% see a dramatic increase in the breadth of marketing skills needed

  • 97% are doing things they’ve never done before

  • 45% can’t find marketing candidates with the right skills.29

  Tim Kopp, then CMO of ExactTarget, summed this up well in a 2013 CMO.com interview when he said that the successful CMO of the future will “not only be chief marketing officer, but chief customer officer, head of strategy, and change agent in chief.”30

  There is a constant demand for new skills and added resources. But if CEOs aren’t seeing our worth, and we’re not able to prove that worth, how do we function in a new landscape? The only way to “prove” worth in this context is for we marketers to step up, take risks, and expand our leadership roles and influence at the same pace as our levels of responsibility increase within an organization.

  We need to lean in. We need to become strategically bold about our capabilities and our responsibilities. We need to become comfortable living and working in beta because that’s where our growth lies—trying new ideas, testing new approaches, and thinking unconventionally. When marketers can move elegantly into these strategic shifts, ambiguity and uncertainty will be seen as opportunities, rather than liabilities.

  It’s time we become more innovative in how we think. That requires us to examine our perceptions about marketing’s role and how we can lead change. But here’s the kicker: We can’t convince executive leadership of the value we deliver to an organization unless we believe it ourselves and walk the walk, i.e., demonstrate that value.

  Rather than take the safe route, marketers must sit at the executive table and lead strategic conversations about the growth of their organizations. They need to become comfortable with both accountability and change, becoming more agile in the process.

  Great marketers step beyond their areas of responsibility and transform their organizations. They spend a great deal of time understanding the operational and financial details of their company, while immersing themselves in the wo
rld of their customer, gaining insights and perspectives. They’re perpetually curious, which makes it easier to transition from a tactical marketing role to that of a trusted advisor and strategic partner at the executive level.

  MARKETERS AS GROWTH DRIVERS

  So, yes, we agree—marketing should be a vital growth function that takes any company to new places, connecting the dots in valuable ways, creating a thread between legacy thinking of the past and innovative insights going forward.

  To do that, marketers must insert themselves into the overall corporate strategy. We need to make it clear that we’re not just the idea people; we must be part of the group that stays in the room to get the work done. Marketers must be the ones who can have intelligent, strategic conversations with IT, sales, product development, human resources, finance, and the rest of the organization. It’s hard. But, in order to lead transformation, we have to put our heads down, roll up our sleeves, and hold ourselves accountable alongside everyone else.

  For marketers to truly transform organizations, we have to go beyond asking, “What’s the role that marketing could have?” to ask ourselves, “What role will marketing have in OUR organization?”