I've been telling people that I’m the world’s worst CMO for years now. This is because I’m highly critical of the discipline I lead, and I’m openly skeptical of its value in today's noisy, influencer-saturated, doom-scrolling world.
A bold strategy, Cotton – let’s see if it works out for me.
I hold a slew of controversial beliefs about my field. For one, I believe marketing is impotent
when separated from its down-funnel friends that convert the hard-won leads and retain the
accounts. If we don’t take a vested interest in the customer experience and the delivery of the product or service we’re selling, we’re missing the boat in a couple of critical ways.
First, it’s pretty snake-oily to not take interest in real customer outcomes, full stop. Secondly,
converted customers who flush all the way through your funnel, only to be scorned, will back up into your shower in the form of negative reviews and ratings. In today's digital world, where reviews are a more valuable currency than brand, this result can be devastating for future growth efforts. Churn numbers go up, acquisition cost goes up, lifetime value of the customer goes down, margin goes down—the kind of math that makes me feel sad. But the good news is that reversing the equation reverses the outcome. Caring is good, but it’s also good business.
For a marketing function to create real business value, it also needs to be plugged into up-
funnel activities that keep a keen eye on the market, product, and pricing. As influencer culture has proliferated, many of these fundamentals are being pushed to marketing’s margins and rehomed to other functions that love them more than we do now that we’re too busy with voluminous, short-form social media content creation in the new Attention Economy.
This is a huge mistake that I will not stop throwing fits about. The nature of attention has
changed dramatically, but the building blocks of business are still the same. For this reason, this new variety of brand marketing often fails to create business value. Many of us have gone so far off the deep end creating a compelling personality for an LLC that we sometimes forget our business exists to solve the problems of other people—individuals also sometimes referred to as “people that aren’t us” or “not me”—a demographic of shrinking power. The way so many brands have completely turned the camera around from the customer to themselves is a sign that we are being influenced rather than influencing.
Attention for attention’s sake is a distraction. It does not directly increase shareholder value, top- line revenue, or margin, so it should be considered a means to an end, not an end in itself. Knowing this, our ambitions as modern marketers must be grander; more focused, disciplined, and discerning.
My solution is simple: return to the basics. In an environment of shrinking budgets and
influence, effective marketing teams are getting re-obsessed with their customers’ problems,
and they are winning market share in their categories for their efforts.
They are strengthening the cartilage between product development, marketing, and customer success to ensure that when we do earn a prospect’s valuable attention, we have something of value to offer, and we deliver on that value. Drop me in a financial institution that has divorced marketing from product development, and I will show you the hives it makes me break into.
This partnership, done well, turns your growth initiatives into a multi-lane superhighway. When the product team is identifying and solving for sub-optimally met customer needs, marketing is getting the right message in front of the right prospects, and the client success teams are communicating customer feedback back to the product team, you have yourself a veritable three-headed monster with all three heads pointed in the same direction.
This will take collaboration, market research, and many hours on vendor discovery calls to
ensure you understand the landscape of products, channel partners, and shifting customer
expectations. It’s a heavy lift to orchestrate these cross-silo collaborations, but this strategy will create a measurable competitive advantage over brand-only financial institutions that deploy marketing campaigns and then leave them at the train station with a $20 bill pinned to their chest.
Fight to put the customer center stage. Make their problems your obsession. Give time to
founders and tech companies that can turn these problems in their heads with you. Partner,
collaborate, and get solutions to market so the customer can touch it, interact with it, and break it. Listen, improve, and iterate. This is the unglamorous work of building a better world, and marketers should be in frame.