Marketing has changed
When I started my career as a brand marketer in FMCG and luxury goods, the internet had just been invented, and at the time the “Information Superhighway” as it was referred to was little more than a curiosity. We could see that it had potential to reach audiences via a new channel, but I don’t think we really had any idea how much it would change our jobs, or our lives for that matter.
Back then, marketing was a different beast compared to now. The brand management roles I had tended to cover the full marketing mix, across product design, production, pricing, promotion, comms and distribution. Today many of these functions are hived off into specialist teams, some of which such as product management or pricing, may even sit within teams that are not considered part of ‘marketing’ anymore. In terms of communications, back then there was a lot of print, and a lot of channel marketing.
It wasn’t just about a different scope of the activity, the entire cadence of marketing was different. Around September we’d plan out our marketing calendar for the following year. We’d plan the major activities and campaigns across various channels. This was reviewed and refreshed quarterly, but for the most part you pretty much stuck with it. Of course, there were unplanned events that came up – such as the odd PR crisis, product recalls, or seizing on new opportunities, such as new sponsorships, partnerships or advertising opportunities. But for the most part it was relatively calm and organised. We’d work through the campaigns on our activity calendar, and we had time to balance the day-to-day operations of our jobs with the more strategic view of our operations.
The marketing treadmill
If we fast forward to today, things are quite different. Digital now accounts for around 70% of all advertising spend. There are now gargantuan channels such as search and social that never existed in 1995. We have a choice of thousands of marketing tools and petabytes of data to inform our decision making and streamline our execution. Everything is now ‘always on’, real time and personalised. Campaigns are continuously optimised and enhanced for each market, segment and geography. Marketing has moved from a being driven by people, intuition and relationships to technology, processes and data.
Despite all this data driven decision making, it’s taken a long time to get it right. Between 2005 and 2016, marketing effectiveness dipped as we came to grips with new channels and techniques and learned how to be effective online. That’s an entire decade of trial and error. Happily, now it seems that we are on a more even keel, but when I look around at marketing teams, both ones that I’ve worked in on client side, and ones I’ve worked with on my time in agencies, I can’t help but feel we’ve lost something.
When I look at marketing teams and what they devote their energy, people and budgets to, there’s a lot of operational activity. There’s a lot of cranking the handle day in, day out. There’s a lot of making minute tweaks to the marketing machine to optimise performance. Marketing feels less aligned to creative inspiration and more to a process. It’s a bit like a mining operation, where we aim to put more and more ore into the hopper and tweak the successive refining processes to yield the precious metals we’re after. It feels that the balance between strategic thinking and operational execution has tilted strongly in the direction of the operational.
The future of marketing
This observation isn’t just a bit of nostalgia for the ‘good old days’ on my part. I say it more with an eye to the future. Because when we look at where marketing is going, we’re seeing a massive uptick in the use of AI and automation. We’ll see this not only in the automation of the tasks in our day-to-day work, we’ll also see it in how consumers interact with our brands. For example, there may well be a future where search ceases to be relevant at all, but instead where consumers use AI ‘agents’ to do all the research for them.
The thing that AI and machine learning is really good at is making sense of the repetitive and the operational. It’s excellent at looking across the data, drawing conclusions and making improvements. What it’s not so good at are the more complex and intuitive functions, such as strategy and planning, and the intuitive understanding of humans and what resonates with them on an emotional level. If our marketing teams and skillsets are skewed towards the operational, it creates some real issues with how we’re developing our skills and people to manage the things that AI and automation are not very good at. Just as our jobs as marketers, and the skills we need to do them are different now to 30 years ago, so they will be different again in 5- or 10-years’ time.
We’re all too busy, too busy to change
Now, we may just take the approach that this will all happen organically. New tools will be introduced, and we’ll gradually adapt how we work. But if we look at what happened between 2005 and 2016, we can see that we pretty much lost an entire decade of marketing effectiveness while we used trial and error to get things right. Only this time around, our marketing resources are already stretched with the sheer volume of day-to-day operational work.
What bandwidth do we have to initiate any planned transformation in the way we work? It’s the horns of a dilemma – we know change is coming and we must adapt, but we are also fully occupied with the here and now, we don’t have the bandwidth to change. We need to create the space for ourselves to think, and act strategically, to be creative and intuitive, but we’re just so damned busy.
The answer to this problem may come from an unlikely direction: Productise your marketing.
What do we mean by productising marketing?
Productisation is a process where you look across your marketing activities and organise them into a standardised, configurable catalogue of modular services. These services can then be assembled with other services to order to execute a range of marketing activities. Each service in the catalogue has a set of standardised parameters that can be selected, and they are delivered to an expected quality, in a known timeframe, and for a predefined cost.
For example, the production of a printed brochure would have a defined set of choices for say, size and complexity and quality. Depending on what is selected, the item would have a predefined delivery timeframe, cost, and quality expectations – e.g. delivery to a set of design standards. It would also have a dependency on other items in the catalogue, such as content, and imagery. There would also be an associated workflow for its production, and there would be a team, or teams that would be responsible for delivery either internally, or externally via, such as via an agency.
Productisation gives us certainty, repeatability and scalability. It also give us a process of product management, which is extremely important when it comes to automation, which I’ll get to later.
I can already hear some of you thinking: “wait, what? How does standardisation of our marketing outputs make us more creative? Surely, productisation is the opposite of that? It’s constraining our freedom!”. On the face of it, it does sound contradictory. But it’s important to consider that there are two kinds of freedoms:
1. Freedom within a framework
Creating a framework doesn’t eliminate creativity, it sets some boundaries within which it can take place. Let’s be honest, we all work this way already. We work within budgets, brand guidelines, design systems and organisations that apply constraints to what we can do. Productisation merely codifies that. Yes, it may apply some more constraints, but it’s done with an eye toward the second kind of freedom:
2. Freedom outside of a framework
This is about creating something completely new. This is the real creative freedom many marketers aspire to. We used to go to agencies for this stuff, but these days, they’re also tied up with the delivery of the day-to-day. It’s why RSW reports that 40% of clients fire their agencies for dissatisfaction with their strategy or thinking and 35% fire their agencies for dissatisfaction with creative. We’re all so tied up with doing the doing that we often don’t have the space for the genuinely creative. This is where productisation really pays off. It creates the space and resources for creativity by shrinking the time, cost and effort of executing the day-to-day. New things get tried, they get added to the catalogue and are then refined.
The discipline of product management
Productisation, isn’t just about organising your services into a catalogue, it’s also an ongoing process of product management, where you continually refine and enhance your products, or, if they aren’t performing, you stop offering them. It implies measurement and continual improvement of the things that work and elimination of things that don’t.
It’s this very discipline that facilitates the introduction of AI and automation in a controlled manner. By understanding your catalogue of services, what they cost, and the value they deliver, you can make informed decisions about which ones can benefit most from automation. By productising you begin to recognise the high value items that need people and automate out the ones that don’t. You also do it once and then reuse that capability many times, rather than doing it in isolation only to repeat again it somewhere else.
It's time to get ourselves ready
Marketing is heavily technology driven, and that’s only going to intensify. Our colleagues in the IT part of our organisations learned some time ago that a structured approach to service management was the only way to manage quality, repeatability, reliability and cost of their services. We as marketers could learn from their example. It’s time to organise ourselves for the next wave of marketing transformation.
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