The CEO view of marketing and defining what good looks like: Your Marketing Week

Marketing is great but…

“Marketing has the ability to change the trajectory of the business, not just the trajectory of the sales and profit, but the trajectory of the energy in the business.”

And the award for positive affirmation of the week goes to… not a marketer, but a CEO – the recently departed boss of McDonald’s UK business, Alastair Macrow. OK, so the CMO turned CEO of a huge marketing organisation, preaching to the converted at the IPA’s Effectiveness conference this week, but still. Wise, informed and uplifting words from someone who knows what’s possible and deliverable.

As you might expect, there was a but. It wasn’t an unequivocal love letter to his peers. Macrow warned against falling into a 1P cul-de-sac by overstating the importance of advertising and, by extension, overlooking what matters – citing product and experience as examples of what make for brand and business success. All in service of avoiding being seen by the C-Suite as the department that does the “fun stuff” but is perhaps periphery to the important and consequential matters.

Macrow’s celebration of what’s possible is welcome. Amid a challenging environment and greater budgetary scrutiny, it’s important for people to hear from someone of his status that there is an opportunity. And although his watch-outs and mitigating advice aren’t new, that doesn’t make it any less necessary.

Marketing Week’s own research this year found that only a third of marketers have influence over price and place, and half over product, compared to almost a full house for promotion. A reality likely indicative of how the scope of marketing has been defined and redefined by others. Elsewhere in our Career & Salary Survey, almost three-quarters of CMOs reported that marketing strategy was undervalued by the business. A finding open to interpretation, granted, but a strong argument could be made that this is illustrative of the perception of the role by others and, worse, a damning assessment of a CMO’s strategic capability.

The opportunity is there, but more needs to be done to seize it.

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Own the opportunity

Which, coincidentally, was also the theme of last week’s Festival of Marketing. ‘Seize the Opportunity’ was an attempt to inspire and enable. We continued to publish reports of sessions covering both objectives this week, one of which was a great adjunct to Macrow’s comments.

“Marketing is misunderstood. Nobody loves us. Nobody gives us money. Stop. If you don’t define what good marketing looks like, somebody else in the C-suite who took an MBA in the 1980s is going to define it for you. Show them what good looks like.”

If Macrow wins the award for feel-good thought of the week, then this, from Cytiva’s vice-president of marketing, Conor McKechnie, wins the gong for tough love.

McKechnie was speaking on a panel with two other experienced and accomplished B2B marketers, Jon White and Mary-Anne Russell, about what B2B marketers must “stop, start and continue” doing to “seize the opportunity”.

The B2B context is important. At risk of a broad brush generalisation, B2B marketers have a bigger challenge than their B2C counterparts of making the case for marketing. More, arguably, at risk of the scope of marketing being decided by others.

But it’s not just B2B marketers who report their CEO thinks they know marketing better than them, regardless of the route they took to the top job. B2C marketing leaders have confided similar. And the antidote is the same. Stop bemoaning, start demonstrating, and in meaningful ways. As Specsavers’ CMO Peter Wright said elsewhere at Festival: “It’s literally pointless for me to talk in marketing talk to the board or to John [Perkins, his CEO].”

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The long and short of influence

Brands have been ploughing more and more into influencer activity, giving up a greater percentage of their marcomms budget to creators that some have argued engender trust in a way that traditional advertising never could.

Use of influencers has been debated more vigorously than any means to reach, engage and sell ever has. With its detractors vehement in their objections that the metrics used to determine effectiveness are largely meaningless, its advocates have declared it to be the silver bullet to success.

What has been missing is evidence of impact, and the same evidence that is applied to traditional media. Until now. To coincide with its conference, the IPA announced the results of a significant study into the long- and short-term impact of influencer activity.

Less surprising, perhaps, is influencer activity was found to deliver over the short term, ROI comparable with all channel averages. Explicit calls to action and jumping on memes and trends an aid to instant wins, it seems.

More eye-catching and potentially more significant is evidence of long-term impact. Some of the measures used by the IPA had influencer ranking higher than any media. So, influencer wins. If there was a debate, it has been unequivocally won. Not quite. There are plenty of caveats. The sample size is relatively low – 220 campaigns from 144 brands across 36 sectors and 28 markets, and amounting to £133m, a drop in the ocean of what’s been spent. It’s not just limited in volume – what’s been analysed isn’t representative of everything. The quality of influencer activity varies significantly. Also, TV, for example, has been delivering for brands for many decades. Influencer marketing is nascent by comparison.

Nevertheless, all disclaimers aside, what the IPA published is important. Influencer-led marcomms that are platform appropriate, authentic and entertaining deliver in the short and long term.

The week ahead

Following on from what Conor McKechnie was saying at Festival, we will be digging into the fact, according to the latest findings from our State of B2B Marketing survey, that brand building is not a priority for the majority of B2B businesses.