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 everyone went home with some data sheets and a stress ball then the marketing job was as good as done.
But then digital happened and customers 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 the way that marketing teams usually do.
They reached for 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 now 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. As 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 within organisations.
So, instead of the service integration that we were promised, what we got was strategic fragmentation. A marketing industry focused on executing strategic plans developed by someone else.
And so, here we now are. On the edge of another revolution and asking what that means for an industry that still hasn’t come to terms with the last one!
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.
And so, we all sleep-walked into a loyalty-free, subscription-driven, emotion-charged, community-based world. Where customers were able to remain anonymous so deep into the sales funnel, that it was almost impossible to get close to most of them until they bought something.
As a result, sequential marketing models all but died. But the marketing industry responded by trying to shoe-horn existing thinking into new boxes, when what was needed was a re-think of the discipline from the new customer buying perspective.
If history has taught us anything, it’s that to do that, you need to understand the technology first.
And the people who are best placed for that now, are part of agile technology teams who have developed processes around buyer journeys that create customer-focused product experiences.
Because this is what is going to drive differentiation in an AI-inspired world.
So, it doesn’t really matter what mistakes the marketing industry has made up to this point because the technology is about to overtake them.
AI may be replacing many labour-intensive marketing tasks and improving targeting and testing capability. And while that is taking cost out of the organisation and improving efficiency. It’s replacing marketing people with machines andnot addressing that fundamental problem with the marketing skill-set.
To exist, marketing people are going to have to climb the value ladder very quickly. They are going to have to learn how to develop unique data sources and get good at things like driving analytics through an organisation, unifying data sources, integrating workflows and developing collaboration.
The days of dreaming up creatives in a Green Room and spuriously aligning yourself to a sales target are well and truly over. It’s not just a case of marketing can’t just be one ‘P’ anymore. Marketing as a thing is now in a fight for its own survival.
Gavin McClement
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