Local Leverage: Are marketers missing the mark with community-driven activation?

PLEASE NOTE: This transcript has been created using fireflies.ai – a transcription service. It has not been edited by a human and therefore may contain mistakes 

 
00:03 
Dom Hawes 
You are listening to unicorny and I am your host, Dom Hawes. Welcome back to part two with Adrian Coxon, CMO of Xant. In part one, were talking about the value of marketing within the overall organization. And one of the things we covered was talent and remuneration. But real talent is motivated by more than cash. The best marketers I know want a challenge. They want to work on something that's well constructed. They want to create something brilliant. They want to make change. And one of the ways to enable this is in one of the other P's. It's to bring product back within marketing's purview. Think of marketers as the guardians of the customer life cycle. We are our customers representatives in the boardroom. We are the people who can go to finance, who can go to engineering and get our customers point of view across.  

 
00:54 
Dom Hawes 
After all, no company has a perfect product. There's always room for us to help make it better. So let's go back to the studio now and hear how Adrian has been able to help move product forward again.  

 
01:08 
Adrian Coxon 
It goes back to that role as the marketers, being the person who understands customer the best. Ultimately, at the end of the day, you've got to make sure that whatever business you're in, that you're delivering what the client needs. That's the only way for long term for business to succeed. I mean, you can talk about FMCG brands and you can launch a new fatty thing and people try it, they'll have a go, they'll try the products. Previously we talked about the sampling and how you can try products like that. The kind of products I'm selling, they're b, two B SaaS style heavy investments. You can't try these. They're big decisions. The people will tend to go with a safe call. And this is what I've seen in my career. If you're pitching against people, recognized brands and marketers get this all the time.  

 
01:50 
Adrian Coxon 
So if you're looking at an ad tech stack, are you going to find the best technology out there or are you going to stick with the Microsofts, the Adobes, the well known suites? Because the reality is they're expensive, they're hard to use, they're problematic, but it's a brand recognition, it's a brand name. And I think we have the same problem trying to sell our own products. If you're trying to sell your products against another company that's got a stronger brand than you, the only thing that's going to make you different is it's either the product's better or your service is better and they're the only two dials you have. And what I do a lot of my role is I have my current job. I've got someone whose specific job in marketing is a research analyst.  

 
02:29 
Adrian Coxon 
And all he doing is going out and he's looking at what the competitors are doing. So we've got accounts with all the competitors, we're customers of all the competitors. So we see how they treat us, what emails they send us, how do they communicate changes to the product, how they communicate regulatory issues, etcetera. So I'm monitoring that. We're also looking at their platform development, their roadmaps. We can see where they're going, what they're doing, that research role that we also, because of where we are almost fintechy. So we're looking at the fintech space and we're starting to look about, well, how are people in that space developing products and what are, that may be things we could steal and take into our industry that's a little bit more stayed.  

 
03:07 
Adrian Coxon 
The way I see it a little bit is almost like we are the startup within the company. If you like the marketing department, they're the startup. So we're the people who really should have a feel for the customer, for the competition, for the market, for what's really going on out there. Exciting stuff that's happening, maybe in unrelated markets, but that could cross over. And then our role is to bring that back to the business and go, look, we should be doing this. This looks really exciting. This is the next level of whatever we should be looking at. The company I'm in now, the AI, everyone's talking about AI, but two years ago we grabbed AI and we started playing with it. We started incorporating AI within the business.  

 
03:44 
Adrian Coxon 
If you look at the Xante website, we produce reports and everything has this iconic visual imagery that's created with the AI. And every day we produce daily reports, it's a market report. And every day we get a unique AI image that relates back to whatever the topic of the day is. So it could be oil, so we'll have something around oil. Bitcoin is buzzing around at the moment. It's massively up and down. It's a roller coaster. So we will have, we'll have cryptocurrencies flying around a roller coaster. We adopted that technology two years ago, and everyone now is talking about AI. And that's what I think marketers can be. I think we're like, we should be the people who are. We're the artists as well.  

 
04:23 
Adrian Coxon 
We should be looking around and trying to grab things that are going on in the wider world and bring them into the company. And I think that's what attracted me to advertising to begin with, because what I saw with the great ad campaigns, what they were actually doing is they were basically going to art galleries, they were following designers, they were looking at what culturally was happening around them, and then they were incorporating that and producing adverts that were of the zeitgeist. And I still think that's almost like a role that's been lost a little bit in marketing, that were meant to be the people who have not just the pulse of our company, our industry, but the wider pulse of what's going on. Because who else in the business is looking at that? Who's looking at the future?  

 
05:00 
Dom Hawes 
So we just talked about the zeitgeist and how marketers are artists and they should be bringing cultural reference into their business to make them more relevant. Which neatly segues into another thing we talked about when we met online, which is opportunities that marketers have to get their businesses involved at a much more local level and to activate their brands in a much more meaningful way than just considering, like, the big, the global sponsorship. Because, of course, those, that's beyond the reach of most companies. Talk to me a little bit about your experience of really getting involved in community and local levels.  

 
05:32 
Adrian Coxon 
And again, this is another interesting thing, because as marketers, as well as having given away our creative powers a little bit, we're given big budgets, we've given money to play with. We're allowed to create opportunities out in the market. What we've forgotten within that is there's a responsibility with that. So there's a kind of Spider man, you know, with great power comes great responsibility. But there is a responsibility with what we're doing. Where are we spending our money as marketers? Who do we spend our money with? So, for example, Facebook. It's a kind of necessary evil. But for me, I'm not a massive believer in what Facebook does.  

 
06:03 
Adrian Coxon 
I don't like what they're doing in terms of, if you look at the impact they have on the youth, the impact they have on the news cycle, et cetera, it's not a business I'm that enamored with. So why is marketers, are we spending all our money with them? Because we're the ones who are actually building them. They're a marketing machine. So if we stop spending money on them, they fall apart. And as marketers, we have power to influence them. So I think there's an element of what do we do as marketers? And you touch on the zeitgeist as well. People are more and more concerned when they're dealing with companies and brands, about whether those brands behave well and do they mean what they say and what are they doing for the kind of the wider community, for the wider world?  

 
06:43 
Adrian Coxon 
And you see, obviously, there's the B Corp, which I understand the B Corp concept, but I think for me, the B Corp, if people don't understand, it's a certificate you get that shows you, as a business, fulfill certain ESG regulations. You have to get a certain score to get the B Corp load, and you can you improve your score depending on how your social governance, etcetera. But I see the B Corp thing. A lot of businesses have got them. It's a tick box exercise. What they're doing is they're using it as a badge. Look, we're good, but actually, are you really doing good? And I think as a marketer, one of the things we have an opportunity to do is to look at our customers, what our customers care about, what they're really interested in, and how can we impact change at that level.  

 
07:22 
Adrian Coxon 
So what I like to do is, you mentioned before, it's like, you know, you've got to build the brand. How'd you do it? It's the old fashioned questions. In the old days in media, you need to do a brand advert. You do tv. No marks ever got sacked for doing a tv ad. It was the bread and butter. As soon as you go off piece and you try and do something different, if it doesn't work, then your CEO's calling you up and it's like, why didn't you just do Sally? And I think, again, when you're trying to build brands now, it's fear of messing up. That's the phrase you gave me when we spoke earlier, and it really stuck with me. They're driven by a fear. They're not looking at the opportunity.  

 
07:54 
Adrian Coxon 
What they'll do is they'll go and say, well, we need a sponsorship. We'll sponsor Man United. It's a big global sponsorship. Does it work? Does it deliver Roi? Yeah, it looks good. The people on the board are happy, the CEO's happy. It looks like everything that everyone else is doing, you're not stepping out of line. And I think what I prefer to do is I actually like to go and talk to our customers. Why would I sponsor Man United? How many of my customers actually support Man United? I mean, they support football, which is a different thing. So my view on that would be, well, let's support football. Let's go grassroots and let's look at the game properly. So where does the game. Let's sponsor local teams, let's sponsor local leagues. That's much more interesting to me.  

 
08:31 
Adrian Coxon 
And then the money, the millions of pounds I could give to Manu, that just gets sucked up into a big corporate machine and it makes up a couple of weeks salaries for one of their players. Suddenly that money can impact real change locally. If your client base, for example, resonates with that sport, that's where I would spend your money. I would go down there, we're a global business, and I've looked at this for me, globally. How do I build a global brand? You kind of want a headline sponsorship, like man knew. Everyone's heard of you. I'm taking a different route. So I'm going into this. It's the kind of HSBC global local concepts, but I'm actually sitting down with all my local sales teams and I'm saying to them, what should we do here? So we've got an office in Latvia.  

 
09:11 
Adrian Coxon 
It's one of our kind offshoots. And I'm talking to them about what's interesting here. And ice hockey is big, which is the kind of big ice hockey club everyone follows and you say, okay, well, why don't we sponsor them? You know, it's quite interesting. People follow. It's local, it feels relevant. Obviously, outside of Latvia, no one's ever heard of it, but it doesn't matter associators and realize we're doing something locally. We can take people to the games and it's peanuts. You're talking. The actual cost of this is nothing. And this feeds back again into the skillset within the company. Doing a global sponsorship is quite easy. You'll produce a head of sponsorship, you'll get someone in, you can manage it with two or three people to engage locally across all these different countries and activate the local sponsorships. It's a lot more work.  

 
09:55 
Adrian Coxon 
You're not spending as much money, but what you are doing is you need to bring in a team of people who can actually activate and get these sponsorships working for you at the local level. And so you're spending less on media, you're spending less on the sponsorship deal, but you're spending more building teams of people who can actually deliver excellence across those kind of opportunities.  

 
10:15 
Dom Hawes 
You're living a behavior that speaks more about the brand than any paid media ever. Good.  

 
10:20 
Adrian Coxon 
Yeah, yeah.  

 
10:20 
Dom Hawes 
Cause you're engaging locally. I mean, I would think so much more just in terms of effectiveness. I would think that's far more effective than just splurging budget on a global branding campaign.  

 
10:29 
Adrian Coxon 
It's the zeitgeist again. I think people have got bored of. You've seen it with what's going on with Saudi Arabia at the moment and they're just throwing money at stuff. You can say, is it a form of greenwashing? Because these are countries that are, they're trying to shift their brand recognition, they're trying to shift who they are, what they're perceived as. Qatar did it with the World Cup, Saudi Arabia's doing it with golf and with boxing and with other sports as well. I think people look through that and they understand that it's just a money's game. Does the saudi government actually really care for you as a consumer, as a person? Not sure. Not really sure they do. They're just sponsoring big, big ticket items. So for me, I feel like the zeitgeist is shifting away.  

 
11:08 
Adrian Coxon 
And I think people will respond to you as a brand if you are actually doing stuff that actually touches them in a more real way.  

 
11:20 
Dom Hawes 
What Adrian's really talking about here is integrity. It's a key ingredient in building well loved brands. You know, customers know when we're being real and they can smell fake a mile off. We might counter that by saying, if the price is right, does it really matter? Do they care? Well, I think they do care, and I think it does matter because the price can't always be right. Studies show that brand loyalty regularly beats price, even in tough financial times. And in a race to the bottom, there's always someone who's prepared to go further. So brands that cultivate relationships have a strategic edge over their competition. And at the local level, oh, theres a huge role for brands to fill, especially as traditional community players struggle.  

 
12:02 
Dom Hawes 
If we look at small businesses who fill that void and take on more active roles in their local communities, whether thats sponsoring the local school sport team organizing Easter egg collections for the local hospice, whatever it is, the message it sends is theyre here for people and theyre here for good. And this approach can function as a blueprint for a global organization that wants to prove their local chops. Now, I'm not suggesting a multinational does egg collections, but it all comes down to Adrian's point about choice. Do you invest in one big thing that might not work, or do you prove your value to the community? And the more local we've become in our working habits since COVID the more this has become both a problem and an opportunity for marketers. Let's rejoin Adrian in the studio right now to explore that thought.  

 
12:46 
Adrian Coxon 
COVID was, for me, was crazy things to live through. When you look back now and you realize what happened in society, that we locked down and everyone sat at home, but everyone didn't sit at home. It's like people like us sat at home where the country was still running. We were sat at home watching Netflix while people ran around us. It's caused a shift, and I'm not sure that we've settled back into a new rhythm of working. And I'm also thinking it's shifted the way people consume media, and it's shifted the way people respond to advertising and prompts. I'm struggling to kind of come to terms with where we are now. I mean, even the work from home. Do people work from home? Are people going to work? And as a marketing guy, how that impacts my decision.  

 
13:27 
Adrian Coxon 
So it's what I love out of home. I love real stuff. I love posters. I think posters are great. They were great formats. A great way of getting a big message out in front of people. I like that real media. I think real media has a value that's intrinsic. You see a little advert on the Internet doesn't carry for me as much as something real. But again, you start to look at, well, people aren't commuting. How is this going to work? So it's really impacted the communities we have. People used to go into work over lockdown. People started spending a lot more time locally where they live.  

 
13:58 
Adrian Coxon 
That kind of starts to impact where as a marketer or as a brand or as a product, the world is shifting, and how are we going to shift to accommodate for it and what the values people have? Following COVID, it's forced people to reassess what's important in their lives and probably what brands and what content they consume. So Netflix did brilliantly over lockdown, but I think people are bored of it now.  

 
14:18 
Dom Hawes 
I mean, I'm assuming that it's a shift, and it may be something you've always done, but maybe that's why there's a shift to more grassroots, more local, more community stuff, because that's where everyone's spending their time now.  

 
14:26 
Adrian Coxon 
So what's interesting is now, as a brand, you've got a situation where you can build a great brand, you've got great equity, people love you. And then similar to what happened with Web Summit where their CEO, Paddy Cosgrove, obviously he made a comment around the palestinian Israel conflicts, and obviously it's black and white now. So you're either pro Israel or you're pro Palestine. And there's a kind of loggerheads there. People are bashing each other's heads. I can't remember exactly what he said, but I remember reading it at the time and thinking, it's not the worst comment I've ever heard in my life. And it seems to be a call towards peace and a call from an Irishman who's seen the conflicts locally. Just reflecting on what he sees. A month later, I think he lost his job.  

 
15:08 
Adrian Coxon 
They bring in a new CEO, Google, Facebook and all these other companies who, for me, aren't. These aren't great bastions of anything, really. They all pull away from that because they don't want to be associated with the comments. Everyone pulls away because they don't want to be associated with his comment. The event that he's built over 20 years, flounders.  

 
15:25 
Dom Hawes 
So they pull away from the comment, but they profit from trading it.  

 
15:28 
Adrian Coxon 
Exactly.  

 
15:29 
Dom Hawes 
That's arch hypocrisy.  

 
15:31 
Adrian Coxon 
Exactly. And I think it's a dangerous space for marketers to be in and for brands to be in. Marmont used it brilliantly. Lovers are haters. They kind of used the hate. But now the hate can be so damaging to you as a marketing business. It's interesting how we navigate that. And it almost goes back to what's the value of marketing in the businesses? We have to look at this and everyone in the company, there's an education job to be done internally because anyone who's a spokesperson for the brand now can get that brand into trouble. And it's almost. Some of these. These things come sideways and not for. This is. This is damage that's done outside of marketing. Is there a role for us on that side? And, you know, in terms of the education internally, when it's black and white, it's very hard.  

 
16:13 
Adrian Coxon 
And should brands comment anyway? Should the brand have a comment about something geopolitical? Maybe there's another thing. Maybe we've got away with waxing lyrical about everything. Maybe it's a bit like the movie stars where they accept their oscars and they start to make a political statement and it's like, no, you're just an actor. I don't really care about your view. So maybe as brands, we need to go back to what do our customers want from us? What do they expect from us.  

 
16:37 
Dom Hawes 
If you under resource your marketing department and you underrate your marketer skills, you won't resonate at a community level. And resonating at community and resonating with your publics is what builds resilience. So that in the event of something going wrong, you're basically building a house on sand. If you resource marketing properly, if you put proper resource allocation in place, if you remunerate your people well enough, if you look after them well, when things go wrong, then you have some substance and some resilience about you and maybe that's something that's being overlooked.  

 
17:08 
Adrian Coxon 
If you behave responsibly as a brand, Facebook, like you said earlier, they haven't got legs to stand on when it comes to this stuff. If you as a brand do things properly and engage with the customers, they're less likely to want to cancel you. They will be more forgiving when you make a mistake. And also, how do you deal with a mistake? One of my favorite brands is able and Cole. So they have an organic box delivery scheme and I've been a client of theirs for I think 20 years. And I just really love what they do. They inform me about everything I buy. They tell me with the provenance, they tell me with the farmer where it's come from. They try and do everything locally and organic, but obviously things like oranges and bananas, they don't grow locally.  

 
17:44 
Adrian Coxon 
So they'll tell me why they're shipping them, where they're shipping them from, why it's better to do it this way than it is to try and grow them locally. They're educators. When they make a mistake, they own the mistake. They come through with you, sorry, your order's wrong, do you want to refund? And then they send you a little bit of a present in the next order to say thank you. And they built up so much resilience with me through being really good around the customer service and my expectations and educating and communicating with me about the things that I find important, which is the environment, the planet, farming, our food system. I'm kind of locked in for life with them as a client. That kind of goes back to that customer experience piece.  

 
18:20 
Adrian Coxon 
The marketers are the people who should have the view of that entire life cycle of the client and making sure that we maintain that relationship for the long term.  

 
18:32 
Dom Hawes 
We began this conversation, this story as an examination of marketing's value. And what I loved about our conversation was where Adrian took us, not just to whether or not marketing is undervalued and how that manifests and why. But he went way beyond that. He went into what we can do about it as an industry. And I think it boils down to two things which, and by the way, this is the really good news. The two things which we as marketers have always been good at when we've been at our best. And the first of those is brand. Now, as new marketers, we've always known that building brand is essential brand equity, as Adrian put it, building a lasting connection with our customers.  

 
19:09 
Dom Hawes 
And while that seems clear, even redundant, to say to a unicorn like you, there is another side to this that probably does need to be told to people that don't believe investing in brand. And it's this. As marketers, we've always known that everything we do builds a brand, whether we like it or not. So if we're charged with purely delivering short term goals like lead generation, then that's what our brand is going to look like. And that is what our brand is going to feel like to our customers. A kind of short term, always on sale, always in fight or flight mode kind of place. Now, I'm not decrying any of those goals, by the way, or any of those things, nor am I trying to paint non marketers as an atheistic executive class who just don't get it.  

 
19:53 
Dom Hawes 
As Adrian pointed out, marketers have made marketing about measurements just as much as anyone else. What I'm concerned about is an exclusive focus on a singular short term metric. But if we just look at the danger of that from an investment point of view, it's not good. Because while we may be able to report a great quarter or a great year, how are we going to keep that up for the next five years? What will our customers do when we're not running a promotion? What's going to happen in a recession? Whose brand are they going to choose then? And what happens when someone comes along with a better incentive than we've got? This kind of short term behavior that represents short termism as a brand can be enormously damaging. I can't believe anyone actually wants to project that kind of image.  

 
20:36 
Dom Hawes 
So maybe this kind of behavior has more to do with the expected tenure of those individuals who are driving the short term wins. I don't know. But surely no one in the business actively wants to feed that sort of short term cycle if they know what the long term cost is and what the inherent danger is to the profitability of the company. And the second thing I wanted to take away from today is the importance of rediscovering marketing's leadership role within an organization. Or. Or maybe I should say rediscovering marketing's symbiotic relationship with the business, because I think all too often, marketing is seen as an adjunct. You know, we're kind of thought of as the customer acquisition people or the providers of air cover for the real war on the ground, as a banker once described it to me.  

 
21:21 
Dom Hawes 
Or, you know, like the one I really hate the most. God, it makes my blood boil. The coloring in department, that stuff, honestly, it's just crap. But when it's hard to tell where marketing ends and where business operations begin, then you know you've got something really special. Now, I'm sure you're well aware of. You probably know the great Avis campaign from the 1960s. Ddbs. We try harder. There were loads of things that were great about that. But for the point of what we're talking about today, the thing that really still inspires me as a marketer is how that campaign worked as a handbook for the company. Everyone knew what a great Avis experience looked like, and everyone knew what they had to do to deliver. It was that marketing like, who cares? To pick up my point from earlier.  

 
22:04 
Dom Hawes 
What mattered was Avis had a very clear view of its destination as a brand. And so, by the way, did every customer that chose to rent from them. Cool, that's a bit better. Now I feel like I've got something off my chest, so probably time to climb off my soapbox now. I'm going to go back to the unicorny stables to seek more inspiration for next week. You've been listening to unicorny, and I am your host, Dom Hawes. Nicola Fairleigh is the series producer. Laura Taylor McAllister is the production assistant. Pete Allen is the editor. Unicorny is a Selby Anderson production.