M CUBED: The Modern Marketing Model

By Thread, Alchemetrics and Selligent Marketing Cloud (TAS)

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There are two certainties in life: death and change. The problem with change today is that it has never been faster.

Introduction: Is marketing broken?

The only thing that is constant is change

In 1964 the father of modern business consultancy, Peter Drucker extolled that ‘the purpose of a business

is to create a customer.’ However, over the intervening years quantity over quality of customers has become

the name of the game. The focus has been on acquisition at any cost, not driving value from an existing

base; on the singular sale as key metric rather than customer value over time.

Unsurprisingly, this approach has given rise to a move from self-regulated best practice to enforced

legislative compliance through the introduction of GDPR. Already the new data privacy directive is

changing the way that marketers think about their customers and through the course of this white paper we

will investigate the new, more agile form of marketing that is beginning to emerge.

Technological change

Moore’s Law serves as a perfect illustration of the exponential growth in the speed of change. In 1965, Gordon

Moore, the co-founder of Intel, made the observation that processing power doubles every two years. Ray Kurzweil

of Google, however, believes this has now shrunk to 12-18 months, and will soon fall below a year as a result of The

Law of Accelerating Returns. As the visual shows, in five years our technology will be 32 times better than it is

now. In 10 years it will be 1,000 times better, and in 20 years it will be a million times more advanced. The rate

of technological advancement in 40 years will be a trillion times greater than today and a quadrillion by 2067.

The mind quite literally boggles. These numbers are so enormous that it is hard for us to understand what this

even means. Yet, understand we must. It is critical for marketers to keep one eye on how technology is changing -

both in terms of how new technology can be used to communicate more effectively with consumers, but also the

technology that consumers themselves are adopting into their everyday lives.

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Behavioural change

However, it’s not just technological change that marketers need to be wary of, it’s the whole ecosystem around

it. Today everything is interconnected and the acceleration of technological advancement is leading to other

changes, such as change in consumer behaviour. It is undeniable that a psychological shift in our behaviour that

demands instant gratification means that consumers are speeding up. For instance, the days of 28 delivery periods

are gone. It’s no surprise, therefore, that patents have been filed for predictive distribution and drone delivery is

likely to be a fully-fledged option by the turn of the decade.

The rise of marketing consultancy

In a bid to manage this change, organisations are turning to outsourced experts and as a

result, Management Consultancy is booming. The global market value of management

consultancy is now placed at around $300 billion. And digital transformation is credited

with driving much of its growth. According to Consultancy Magazine the global digital

transformation market has almost doubled in size over the past 18 months with revenues

of the consulting service line now valued at $44 billion. However, interestingly it’s the

independents that are coming out on top. Research amongst 250 C-Suite execs

across businesses in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland found

that only 19 per cent of organisations would rely on a traditional consultancy

firm for specific expertise. Thirty-seven per cent would turn to independent

consultants. Another study reinforces this. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s

report reveals that 19 percent of multinational companies over $1billion

in turnover are spending more than 25 per cent of their management

consultancy budget with SME consultancies.

The domination of independent consultancy

This is quite a trend. So why is it happening? In our experience it’s the fault of what we

term the ‘consultancy gap’. Traditional consultancies and large marketing agencies are spectacular

at strategizing, solving problems, recommending technology platforms and providing route maps to success.

However, what they don’t do is turn the plan into a reality or help install said tech platform. Knowing what you need

to do doesn’t help you to do it! All too often we hear about inexecutable marketing strategies, clients being left

high and dry with a new technological platform, but no idea of how to use it or marketing campaigns that have

taken months to implement. Modern marketing consultancy can’t rely on strategy alone, it must be execution-

focused and be nimble and agile enough to execute at speed – or risk being left behind. As we will see, traditionally

outsourced consultancies no longer sit well with the changing DNA of client-side marketers.

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The DNA of a Modern Marketer

‘The colouring–in department’, ‘fluffy’, ‘creative-types’ – just a few of the derogatory labels used to describe marketers

over the years. But the advent of the Internet has revolutionised accountability and made marketing more compelling

in the boardroom through the demonstration of clear ROI. As a result the modern marketer is a very different breed to

their forebears. They have to be.

So what does a modern marketer look like? Twenty years ago businesses were traditionally organised by function and the

different departments were encouraged to keep themselves to themselves. But as the world has become increasingly

connected the silos have fragmented and cross-collaboration is now strongly encouraged. Yet many organisations’

outsourcing policy have not caught up. Collaboration can only be truly realised when it is entrenched in an organisation’s

culture and DNA. Having multiple competing agencies/consultancies with their own specialist skill sets is a barrier to the

holistic marketing approach that is necessary to capitalise on convergence.

Likewise, marketers themselves must be more interconnected and have a holistic business knowledge, stretching from

finance through to operations. Most importantly they must be able to talk the language of the boardroom. Presenting

operational marketing metrics like page views or Facebook likes to the board is much less compelling than the ability to

report on business outcomes, such as a six per cent increase in incremental sales from Millennials resulting in an uplift

of £500,000 revenue in six weeks.

IBM’s latest Global C-Suite Study reveals that 67 per cent of CMOs believe that convergence is the single biggest trend transforming the business arena.

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The ability to communicate marketing effectiveness in

business terms needs marketers that are results driven

and committed to accountability whilst simultaneously

being strategic and outcome focused. They need to

have an appreciation of the overall corporate strategy

and be able to pragmatically identify the areas where

marketing can make the most difference. This means that

the ability to derive meaningful information from data is

crucial. Today, business decisions are founded on data.

The complexity of data analysis, especially in the context

of big data, means that data literacy requires knowledge

of mathematics and statistics, something the marketing

department hasn’t traditionally been famed for! Yet, this

must not be to the detriment of creativity. Imagination

and the ability to formulate original ideas remain as

important as they ever were. Creativity needs to apply to

technology, too. Technological curiosity is vital in terms

of keeping an eye on what’s in the pipeline, seeing how

other sectors and functions are applying new tech, like

block chain, AI and machine learning and staying on top

of platform developments including algorithm updates

and new features. And it goes without saying that

modern marketers must be fast paced and inspirational

leaders that are both able to facilitate change and

motivate others to work quickly and efficiently.

Individually these competencies are common traits

in the marketing arena, but when taken together, they

describe the kind of marketer that will join the ranks

of the Marketing Society’s Hall of Fame and ultimately

change the reputation of the industry.

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The challenges faced by modern brand side marketers

Whilst researching this paper, we spoke to a number of client-side modern marketing directors to understand the

challenges they face every day. The same five issues kept coming up, these are:

1. The inability to turn strategy into outcomes

Strategy is inherently complex, but executing it requires simplicity. Research by The Economist Intelligence

Unit reveals that typically strategies fail to deliver 50 per cent of their promised gains and this is because of

the ‘strategic-performance gap’. In other words the inability to turn the strategy into actionable day-to-day

activities. Despite the enormous time and energy that goes into strategy development, many have little to

show for the effort. The old adage is true that a strategy without execution is merely a hallucination.

2. Fear of complexity

The famous saying ‘no-one ever got fired for hiring IBM’ sums up many organisations’ risk attitude. Fear

of the new or unknown is rife. Anything that is considered outside of the norm is difficult to get buy-in for

because if it all goes wrong someone has to take the fall. Consequently implementing effective, game-

changing marketing is difficult, particularly strategies that are based on emerging and exciting technology

like blockchain, deep learning and big data.

3. Inability to make the most of technology

All too often we hear stories of organisations that have invested in new technology but aren’t making the

most of the investment - and is it any wonder? As the Chief Martech infographics show there has been a

proliferation of vendors. It was already a bewildering market, but now it is impossible to carry out exhaustive

due diligence, leading to FOMO and in many cases cognitive dissonance.

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4. The bandwagon effect

Earlier this year a transport company came to us saying they wanted to upgrade their social marketing after

reading about Taco Bell’s Cinco De Mayo (5th of May) activity. The Snapchat campaign, so far the most

successful on the platform, saw the brand launch a sponsored lens that turned consumers’ heads into a giant

taco shell. It resulted in 224 million views in one day. However, turning someone into a vehicle is definitely

not as compelling! This campaign worked because of the context, execution, and customer. The transport

company merely wanted to jump on the bandwagon. The lure of the success of other brands’ campaigns

results in an ‘and us’ mentality where channels are adopted with no strategic reasoning behind them.

5. Rigidity of suppliers

The final challenge faced by modern marketers is the rigidity of their suppliers. For example, one client

we spoke to was bound into a large network and could only execute campaigns using the technology

underpinning those agencies. There was no flexibility in terms of buying into new solutions that would

have supported more personalised, one-to-one marketing. On the flip side are the independent specialists

– yet clients fall foul of these too. For instance when researching this paper a B2B marketer told us of his

frustration when he asked his data platform provider to undertake a simple web design project and their

refusal/inability to do so. As a result he was forced to outsource losing any kind of scale efficiencies he might

otherwise have achieved if he were with a networked agency.

So what does this all add up to? A virtuous cycle of change. A fast changing business environment, a change in the DNA

of marketers and a change in the challenges faced by the new breed of marketer. If innovation is the handmaiden of

change, then the role of the modern marketer is to facilitate innovation.

The question is how? Our second white paper in this series outlines a new framework that has been developed to

not just manage the new marketing realities, but capitalise on them. It enables modern marketing and empowers the

modern marketer by solving the challenges brought about by the fast-changing environment.

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About TASTAS is a unique partnership comprising three marketing specialists – Thread, Alchemetrics and

Selligent Marketing Cloud. We’ve come together in order to facilitate modern marketing and

solve the five key challenges that are plaguing client-side marketers. We’re all award-winning

specialists in our distinct areas but can seamlessly fit together to deliver the fastest, most cost-

efficient, holistic approach to modern marketing available.