User:Wilfred Dunn/sandbox

Big marketing

Big marketing is a term that defines, embodies and directs today’s evolving marketing landscape¹. First appearing in business communications in September 2013², big marketing refers to a current corporate marketing environment wrought with complexity born out of the need to manage constant change, big data, channel proliferation, real-time content development and rapid decision making.³

Contents

• Definition
  
• Validation
  
• History
  
• Marketing’s Uniqueness
  
• Characteristics
  
• Future
  

Definition

Just as big data emerged as the term that describes the use and benefits of unparalleled access to information, big marketing has emerged as the term describing unparalleled complexity and opportunity in the marketing realm.⁴

Changes transforming marketing in the past 10 years include increasing globalization, competition and management scrutiny; the expanding number of channels, data inputs, organizational and systemic silos, and the growing demand for meaningful business intelligence.

Big marketing mandates a modern operational perspective with an advanced level of capability, competence, approach, talent, technology and process leverage and acknowledgement of marketing’s uniqueness among corporate functions. (See figure 1.)

Figure 1: The Makeup of Big Marketing⁵

(Use version from Big Marketing whitepaper)

Validation

Several studies published in the past several years support the concept upon which big marketing is based—that traditional corporate marketing is undergoing revolutionary changes presenting significant challenges to the ability to contribute to revenue growth. In 2011, IBM’s Global CMO Study revealed that the top three challenges for CMOs around the world were data explosion, social media and the growth of channel and device choices. In 2012, Marketing Week’s CMO Roundtable identified data proliferation, social media, and speed/agility as major challenges. In 2013, CMO Challenge participants acknowledged the need to reorganize to adapt to change, and to build new and innovative ways of working that are “more flexible and less political.”

History

Spawned by the industrial revolution, consumers shifted from buying goods and services needed for survival to having a myriad of choices. Sellers began investing in promotion (history of marketing) to stimulate demand and compete in the marketplace. Since the 1950s, marketing has evolved from a mass communication approach to addressable marketing requiring extreme personalization through social and mobile channels through these stages, corporate marketing organizations evolved in tandem: as new capabilities have become available, marketing leaders bolted on new teams to operate them.

Further, as marketing organizations have become increasingly global, and execute through an increasing number of channels, marketing has become more challenging to operate efficiently and effectively, and at the rapid pace the market now demands. It is this growing complexity that spawned the idea of big marketing. (See figure 2.)

Marketing’s Uniqueness

Marketing is recognized⁸ as having unique characteristics compared to other corporate functions. This fundamental difference is driven by marketing’s creative focus, its need to test and course correct, and the often intangible quality of its outcomes that makes it difficult to measure ROI. It is because of his inherent uniqueness that traditional approaches fail when it comes to trying to improve this core function.

Established process engineering approaches don’t work in marketing. Six Sigma and its ilk may work in some areas of marketing, but not all, and often results in fragmented organizations. Marketing-owned approaches such as customer experience management do not fully contemplate marketing’s complex web of corporate marketers, agencies and vendors.

Marketing technology isn’t as mature as other enterprise systems, such as CRM or ERP. The full ecosystem of technologies that help marketers get their work done (Marketing Resource Management, Digital Asset Management) and those that interact with customers don’t harmonize or integrate well⁹. An integrated ERP-like suite of tools for marketing hasn’t been fully executed by software vendors. Attempts at such have resulted in incomplete solutions which are serviceable, but often isolate marketing rather than connecting it to the enterprise, resulting in poor linkage to sales, product or finance groups.

Typical advisors to marketing don’t have the answers. Agencies focus on creative, and often don’t want to address its impact on operations. Traditional business consultants promote people, process and technology solutions, but lack marketing expertise to tailor these approaches to the peculiarities of marketing. Marketing technology vendors are focused on software features and functionality, and commonly minimize the importance of process or organizational design.

The result is a disconnection between the marketer’s operational capabilities and the customers marketing is trying to influence.

Characteristics

The state of big marketing emerged in part because of the uniqueness of the marketing function—the way it relates to other functions, the pace of change of customer-facing technologies, the extremes of loose and tight processes to be navigated simultaneously, and the support of collaborations that result in strategies, plans and creative insights.

Marketing is still adapting to radical changes in channel priorities with the introduction of Web 2.0, social media, and mobile access and the reality that these technologies have ceded brand control to the customer. In many industries, competition is fierce, requiring marketing to apply new insights and versioning up to the moment the message is consumed. Regulatory requirements on financial services, CPG and healthcare-related firms are increasingly complex, creating additional strain on those producing advertising and marketing materials.

In addition, the budget impact of marketing due to economic uncertainty and corporate politics inhibit the ability to plan programming and long-term operational investment.

In contrast to other functions, marketing’s organizational design looks different from one company to the next, and from one team to the next. Even within a single industry, no consistent way of organizing exists. For those charged to design the marketing function, this phenomenon triggers fundamental questions: What is marketing’s role in the firm? How do marketing managers relate to merchandising, sales, finance, IT and other managers? Is there agreement across the enterprise on how the roles and relationships need to work?

Marketing is not stable enough for long-duration improvement projects. Multi-year, multi-phase initiatives often run out of steam, even with an apt budget. The result is that business benefits aren’t realized and initiatives lose support in favor of customer-facing initiatives du jour that purport to have quicker return.

Because central to marketing is a creative process that depends on an amorphous network of people, and multiple potential answers to business problems, it is difficult to break it into a structured methodology.

Individual marketers are part of a network of relationships, connected up, down, across and outside the chain of command. These relationship connections are complex: they may be formal or informal, held together by in-person interaction or by technology, extended through local offices, or span the globe.

Marketing is now required to assess the total cost of marketing infrastructure and operations, as well as impact on the organization as a whole, and the tools and methodologies have not yet caught up to the need.

Future

Addressing the challenges of big marketing requires a marketing organization to unify process, technology and organizational work streams, leveraging the work across all operational spheres. As new consumer channels and big data evolve, marketers will continue to face complexity. In parallel new operational approaches will be tested.

References

1 Big Marketing: Why You Can’t Do Cool Without It Whitepaper, Coffee + Dunn 2014
2 Concept first introduced by Coffee + Dunn marketing operations consultancy 2013
3 Guide to Service Providers for Web Content and Customer Experience Management, Digital Clarity Group, 2013
4 Big Marketing: Why You Can’t Do Cool Without It Whitepaper, Coffee + Dunn 2014
5 Big Marketing: Why You Can’t Do Cool Without It Whitepaper, Coffee + Dunn 2014
6 Adapted in part from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_marketing
7 Interactive Marketing Predictions, Forrester 2013
8 Marketing is Different Whitepaper, Coffee + Dunn 2013
9 Guide to Service Providers for Web Content and Customer Experience Management, Digital Clarity Group, 2013