Marketing’s ‘sweet spot’ is where customer, capability and culture meet

When did things get so complicated?

Marketing has never been an ‘easy’ job, but when I first got into marketing 20 years ago it felt like marketing teams had more of a grip on things.

I started my career as an assistant brand manager at Diageo in Spain, working on a rum brand called Cacique, based in Madrid.

Selling rum to 18- to 30-year-old Spanish consumers with a strategic bias towards big cities and nightlife was brilliant fun, with some exciting, difficult challenges.

We were one of the big players, yet lacked distinctiveness (although distinctiveness wasn’t a thing back then, even if the symptoms and cure were the same). We had stiff competition from all angles – premium, value and other mainstream brands – including Bacardi. The challenges of falling disposable income for young people were just starting to bite.

Yet, despite those headwinds, as a brand and marketing team we were always in control of the direction of the brand. The P&L was ours, and all the levers within it: product, price, place and promotion.

That was the world in which I learned how to do marketing. The brands set the agenda for the business. Marketing drove the strategy because marketing represented the people who handed over the money that drove the business: the customers.

Fast-forward through a couple of decades’ experience working with businesses and brands of all shapes and sizes, and marketers today are operating in a totally different world.

Once masters of their own destiny, marketers now struggle for influence over the critical levers of business.

The new vocabulary of CMOs is likely to include volatility as well as value, complexity as much as commerciality and ambiguity as much as ambition.

Once masters of their own destiny, marketers now struggle for influence over the critical levers of business. With its financial impact underappreciated, marketing is often boxed into communications, or seen as a mere delivery vehicle for business priorities set elsewhere. A follow-on rather than a leading light.

There are lots of reasons for this – the internet has a lot to answer for – but, rather than unproductive ‘what-if-ery’ or ‘if-only-isms, it’s important to focus on the here and now and work out how to move forward.

Why bother? Because there are few things as common as underwhelming marketing performance with potential, and because in a world of uncertainty and fragmentation the opportunity to establish marketing and brand building as business drivers is simply too big to ignore.

We don’t need to rearticulate the evidence for this, it is abundant. We know how brands grow. We know the compound impact of creativity and consistency. We know the multiplier effect of combining brand and performance.

What businesses need is the understanding of how to apply that knowledge to the unique context and commercial circumstance of their organisation, in order to create their own path to future business, brand and team success.

TGJones’ prospects will depend on price, product and place

Marketing is a discipline, not a department

It is that drive to turn marketing into a driving force for businesses which led me to build a thinking framework called ‘The Sweetspot’. I published it in Warc as a model for helping CMOs understand the drivers of marketing effectiveness across an organisation, beyond the world of the customer. (Full disclosure: I am using it to launch a new venture, WhichWayUp, aiming to turn marketing into a driving force for holistic business performance.)

It works as a cross-functional framework by looking at marketing as an organisation-wide discipline across three critical forces: customer, capability and culture. This is in contrast to how marketing is typically viewed – through the lens of strategies, plans and tactics, which are important, but insufficient.

Seeing marketing as a discipline rather than a department is vital. Many parts of what would previously have sat in the marketing function have been carved out and distributed across organisations. This has created specialist functions, which is good, but at the same time has structurally embedded silos, which is bad.

Seeing marketing as a business-wide discipline frees marketers up from the myopic focus on ‘what we control as a function’ into the broader space of ‘what we need to do as an organisation’.

With that perspective, the three forces of customer, culture and capability cover everything that needs to be explored to drive more effective, commercial marketing performance.

• Customer: the effectiveness of all the output which comes into contact with the people whose money drives our business, across all four Ps.
• Capability: the strength of the knowledge, skills, structure and systems needed to deliver effective marketing today and tomorrow.
• Culture: the permission and authority marketing has to drive business strategy and to influence other teams within the organisation.

Those three forces all need to be considered, because if one of them is missing or lagging behind the rest, some clear and regular problems start to appear.

Without a culture that allows marketing to influence the total business strategy, frustration dominates. Marketers find themselves unable to interact fluidly across teams and functions, and plans get developed or executed in silos, without the scale or integration necessary.

Without the right capability, marketers frequently end up exhausted, with plans delivered through blood, sweat and tears rather than focused decision making and a clear understanding of how brands really grow.

Without a thorough understanding of the customer, businesses develop a sense of indifference towards the external world, with plans that chase efficiency, lacking the creativity and energy which makes brand-led activity most effective.

Marketing needs to find its Ferris Bueller moment

Gaps and overlaps

If overlooking one of the three forces highlights the risk, exploring the overlaps between them uncovers the opportunities.

What are the cultural capabilities your team needs to work effectively across the business?

How can customer knowledge feed into your company’s culture and enable all teams to perform better, beyond the marketing department?

Which capabilities need strengthening to really understand your customers and leverage the knowledge we have about how brands grow?

It is by fully exploring the gaps and the overlaps that marketers uncover The Sweetspot. Each business’s profile looks different, but when properly balanced, the three forces of customer, capability and culture give rise to marketing teams that improve performance across all areas of the business. They do that with the respect and permission of teams they interact with, and those teams understand and appreciate the impact of their efforts. Marketers have the skills they need to execute brilliant activity, in both the long and short term, and manage their business accordingly.

Perhaps most importantly, those who find their Sweetspot understand that true marketing effectiveness is about much more than just knowing what makes your customers tick. It’s about coupling that knowledge with an understanding of how the business operates, the skills needed for better cultural integration and how combining all of it makes everything more impactful.

Really effective marketing is not all about the customer, or all about culture, or all about capability.

It’s about how those three forces work together to drive the business forward.

Johnny Corbett is the founder of marketing consultancy WhichWayUp. He has worked in leadership roles for large corporate businesses, startups and agencies and has collaborated widely across sectors including consumer goods, technology, financial and professional services and the public sector.