Back in the day, you could fill a conference room full of lukewarm leads on the promise of a decent finger buffet! As long as people went home with some data sheets and a stress ball, then the marketing job was as good as done.
Then customers got Google and started fact-checking anything interesting on the way back from whence they came and soon, it was just as easy to point new business in the direction of the nearest competitor.
The industry had to change and quickly. So, it grasped the nettle in a way that only marketing teams know how to. And pressed the ‘easy’ button.
Full-service agencies started popping up everywhere promising a much more integrated approach. But a quick glance at these ill-fitting conglomerates was all that was needed to figure out that most were now just agencies that were full of services, being staffed by executives intent on focusing on what they knew best. Even if that didn’t work that well anymore.
Which is why management consultants started to eat their lunch. Because these guys grew up understanding how to develop new customer experiences and disruptive strategies based on dynamic data insights. They also knew how to apply that across lines of business and drive meaningful strategic alliances.
So, instead of service integration we got strategic fragmentation. A marketing industry focused on executing plans developed by other departments. And here we now are, on the edge of another marketing revolution and asking what that means for an industry that still hasn’t come to terms with the last one!
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Technology was meant to set us free. It was supposed to bring marketing closer to the bottom line. But in their quest for ever-more elaborate metrics to justify their existence, CMOs where missing one very important point: that’s not the direction technology was taking the customer in!
It didn’t matter whether you were on the business or the consumer side. Buyers became self-educators and stopped picking up the phone even though they now had one in their hand for most of their waking day.
We all sleep-walked into a loyalty-free, subscription-driven, emotion-charged, community-based world. Where customers are able to remain anonymous so deep into the sales funnel, that it is almost impossible to get close to most of them anymore until they’ve bought something.
As a result, sequential marketing models have all but died. The marketing industry has tried to shoe-horn existing thinking into new boxes, when what the industry needed was a re-think of the discipline from this new customer buying perspective.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now set to transform the industry once again so, is this an opportunity for the marketing industry to reset or has too much damage been done?
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If history teaches us anything, it’s that the most disruptive technologies that emerge won’t come from the established players. They’ll benefit in the short-term, they always do, but they will fall by the wayside because they’re too busy protecting legacy positions.
In order to figure out what is likely to happen, companies need to be able to predict the impact these technologies will have on the customer. And to do that, they need to understand the technologies first.
Marketing teams should be leading this, but let’s not kid ourselves on, that ship has sailed. This is going to be driven by agile technology teams with the winners being those that can develop the most customer-focused products experiences.
So, to answer the original question, it doesn’t really matter what mistakes the marketing industry made up to this point, because the technology is about to overtake them.
AI is already replacing labour-intensive marketing tasks, but it is also starting to enable marketing teams to micro target and rapidly test initiatives in a way that a team of humans simply can’t get close to. So we don’t really need content managers and social media experts anymore, because machines are learning how to personalise the right message at the right time on the right medium.
That doesn’t mean that the creative process is dead, but it does mean that you are not going to be able to dream up a campaign in the ‘Green Room’ again. Innovation is going to have to come from unique data sources and people who want to do more than spuriously align themselves to a sales target.
Success then, is going to be driven by how well you can drive analytics through an organisation, unify data sources, integrate workflows and develop collaboration.
Speed then, is of the essence for the marketing industry. Companies are going to have to figure out what their optimum structure looks like and very quickly, because turning around the tanker is going to be counter-productive if they wait too long.
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I have been through this before with broadband, mobile and cloud. And, if I had a dollar for every doughnut that screamed from the rooftops that the end was nigh; then I’d have a lot of doughnuts.
Nothing ever happened in the way that it was meant to or as fast as everybody thought that it would. But I can’t help thinking that this time it’s different. This time we’re not being constrained by the technology and a human interpretation of it. This time the technology learns what the customer needs. So, it’s not just going to take average humans out of the loop. Even the good ones are in trouble.
Gavin McClement
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