The CMO 2.0 conversation with Michael Mendenhall, who is currently the COO and President at Lipman and who was formally the CMO at HP and the Head of Marketing at Disney, was most informative.
Michael started his career with a small agency and later developed a rich background in corporate marketing at Disney. At HP, he learned a great deal about technology and consumer behavior, content and storytelling, and social and mobility. Most recently he became part of a group that bought Lipman, an 80 year old advertising agency, where Michael is trying to rebuild an agency with an outdated advertising model into a modern marketing, branding and digital communications consultancy.
During our conversation, Michael mentioned that one of the biggest mistakes that marketers made was to allow new media marketing to bifurcate off from the rest of the marketing group. Based on their lack of understanding on how to monetize new media, and justify ROI’s to their CFO’s and CEO’s, marketers set up groups on the side and gave them minimal dollars to test and beta. Not only did they allow those groups to be siloed, they were also underfunded. Marketers did the same with e-cmmerce groups, which became disjointed from the people developing the corporate web site. And they are doing it again with the social – CMO’s are once again not sure what to do with it and are under-funding those efforts in small groups on the side. The marketing department became functionally aligned with channels – a social channel, an e-commerce channel, an m-commerce channel, etc. Agencies did the same thing, aligning themselves against those same channels – resulting in the rise of social firms, digital agencies, commerce types and mobile shops, etc. The problem with a siloed marketing department it that it forces the CMO to spend a lot of time trying to integrate all those groups so that they have one voice instead of focusing their efforts on what matters: How will I grow the business? How am I increasing share? How am I increasing margin? How am I taking share?
It also makes it difficult for the marketer to focus on the customer journey – from discovery to purchase and hopefully repeat purchase and evangelism. The customer does not think of a company as a set of siloed groups or channels and will engage with companies across all those channels at different stages of their journey. In addition, the customer will increasingly engage with touchpoints that are not controlled by the company – peers, friends and other tribal members that are out there making buying recommendations. When Lipman engages with their clients, they try to break those siloes by having every single expert at the table – the head of brand, the head of technology, the head of digital, the head of creative, and the head of media buying.
A new skill-set requirement for marketers in this digital age is the analytical skill-set – the ability to develop a 360 degree view of the customer as they go through their buying journey; the understanding that information is knowledge that gives you a competitive advantage; and the idea that raw data coming from the bricks-and-mortar transactional environments can shape R&D, as well as customer engagement, cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, and even shape customer loyalty. Most marketers do not reap the benefits from all the rich customer data that resides in their repositories. Understanding that opportunity will become as important for marketers as understanding the importance of the compelling story that will engage their customers and prospects. When CMO’s don’t have the wherewithal to deal with big data, they should team up with their CIO to make sense of it. The problem is that CIO’s often focus on storing the data, securing it and serving it up – not so much on providing services to help the business glean insights from it. At Lipman, Michael is trying to fill that gap by having his own Consumer Insights Group and by acting as a go-between between CMO’s and CIO’s. If you are interested in this topic, and are involved with Digital Marketing, you may consider taking the Digital Marketing 2.0 survey which we just launched with the Society for New Communications Research (or pass along the URL to the survey to a colleague - digitalmarketingtwo.com)
All that being said, marketing and advertising are not likely to be become pure technology plays – according to Michael – because what makes the difference is the content and the storytelling that you use to express your brand. Technology, which can be used to make us smarter about when, where, and how to engage with prospects and customers needs to be balanced with great content.
It’s important to understand culture, not only consumer cultures but also corporate cultures. For companies that have a considerable heritage that can be especially tricky. You want to build on that heritage, by pulling out those attributes of the heritage that are relevant in today’s marketplace, without building a museum out of your brand. When it comes to consumer cultures, too many companies chase after the “cool factor” or the novelty – which can be very short-lived and which often detracts from building solutions that have a real purpose,relevancy, and are tied in with current initiatives.
On the future of how companies measure the impact of the relationship they have with their agency, Michael does not think that the push toward sharing risks and rewards will work, because agencies do not control the whole process that determines success. Marketers will need to monitor KPIs that the agency can actually affect, such as KPIs on the information side, and not the internal KPIs related to product success.
In closing Michael had the following words of wisdom for fellow marketers – don’t lose focus on the customer and their journey. While this may sound basic, with most companies being structured around functions and channels, and in some cases having the wrong skill-set, that is not usually something that comes naturally.
Other things we talked about:
- How agencies have been successful at buying all the functional expertise through M&A’s but often failed to do a good job at the integration of all those functions.
- The importance of having stories that are authentic and transparent, because through technology the customer can see and hear almost everything you’re doing as a business
- How consumer data can give you insights into all aspects of the customer-buying journey – when they will buy, when they will leave you, etc.
- How most companies should focus on existing customers rather than new prospects that can cost as much as 10X in terms of customer acquisition cost
- How listening has to become a great shill for marketers
- How the trend towards purchasing creative through procurement is a real bad idea
