52. Demanding what's due: Are marketers under-rated and underpaid?

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 
Welcome to Unicorny. This is a podcast about the business of marketing, how to create value, and how you can help your business win the future. And I'm your host, Dom Hawes. I hear people say that marketing is undervalued all the time. Not all people, of course. If you're listening to this at Unilever, Procter and Gamble, Vanguard, Sage, Adelshaw, Goddard, or any other business that puts marketing right at the core of its process, well, you clearly value marketing. Please stay and listen to this podcast anyway. You know, it's an easy thing to say marketing is undervalued. But what does it actually mean? Does it mean there's suspicion about the effectiveness of the marketing team's output? Does it mean marketers lack of voice in the business, leadership in the boardroom, for example?  

 
00:47 
Dom Hawes 
Or does it mean that you are unlucky enough to work in one of those companies where the CEO doesn't believe in marketing? Well, it could be any one of those things, and it could be something else, too. But if it's the latter, dust off your cv. Life is too short to work for idiots, and anyone who's made it to the top openly stating they don't believe in marketing, in my opinion, is an idiot. They may be a successful idiot, but they're still an idiot. So quit and go where the grass looks greener right now. We've dealt with that. I was speaking today's guest about this very problem, and I was kind of thinking along the lines that I've just been talking about. So I asked him how he knew that marketing was undervalued and his answer was simple.  

 
01:29 
Dom Hawes 
He said that compared to other roles of similar complexity and value, in his opinion, marketers are underpaid. Do you know what? You just can't argue with that. Today's guest is Adrian Coxon, chief marketing officer at Exant, a multi asset investment brokerage and fintech firm. And I'm going to let Adrian tell you his own story, and I think you're going to enjoy the way he thinks. We talk about how and why marketing is undervalued, how the key to regaining lost ground is to reestablish the link between marketing strategy and business success. And we cover much more. But right at the end of today's show, we get all local and we talk about business's impact on local communities.  

 
02:11 
Dom Hawes 
We get to know our guests quite well during the process of making each show, because what you hear in our output is a tiny fraction of the work, the thinking and the discussion that actually goes on to make the show. Now, in Adrian's case, as I got to know him, what really struck me is how thoughtful he is. We need more leaders that think about and then act to impact people positively. And I hope that Adrian's generosity of spirit comes across in this conversation and inspires you as much as he inspired me. Let's go meet him. Agent, why don't you start by introducing us to yourself? In the words of Cilla Black, who are you and where are you from?  

 
02:47 
Adrian Coxon 
It's a tough one because, yeah, it's a long story, depending on how you sell it. But the way I like to tell it is that how I fell into this role, how I became a CMO, and I was always interested in advertising marketing a lot in the old days. I'm old enough to remember that the days of the classic adverts. I really like the advertising. I love the copywriting. I love writing. And so my roots into advertising really was through that. I liked the idea, the saatch and saatchy idea of creating those emotional bonds between brands and people. That's what really appealed to me. So originally I wanted to be a copywriter. I couldn't find an art director who would stick with me long enough. Then through that process, I was in ad agencies.  

 
03:22 
Adrian Coxon 
I was introduced to media because they said, look, you know, you're good with language. You've got that side of stuff. Also had a maths degree. So they were saying, well, you're very numerate as well. Media combines the two. You should maybe have a look over there. So that's how I fell into the kind of media game. And I started off in agencies. I started off Mediafest, which is now starcom, in the old days. And while I was there, obviously traditional media, radio, tv, the usual, and the Internet popped up. And then I just realized at that point, this was going to be the future. This is the way of creating one to one dialogues again with the audience. And I also thought creatively it was open game. You know, no one had really done it, no one knew what they were doing.  

 
04:00 
Adrian Coxon 
So it was much more fun to play with than the standard media. It's funny because one of themes we're going touch on today is about is marketing undervalued. And the reason I went client side from the media agencies originally was because I didn't think they were valuing the skill sets that we had. We were seeing people in.com firms who were cmos, marketing people in.com firms who were getting equity share and rolling out with lots of money, at the end of the day, taking a risk. But the rewards were there for working within those businesses. I didn't see media, traditional media agency set up with rewarding people at the right level. That's why I switched then and went client side. And it's interesting that we're going to be talking about that a little bit today as well. I switched across. I went into finance.  

 
04:38 
Adrian Coxon 
I've been working finance now 20 years. I've worked for big brands like IG, Saxo Bank, Gain Capital. I've also worked as a consultant. So I've broken out of finance. D two C launched a Bangkuri brands, which are kind of retail consumer FMCG brands, played around in that space for a bit, and now I've ended up in kind of b two B finance again.  

 
04:58 
Dom Hawes 
I remember the Internet, certainly when that appeared and exactly as you described it, like there wasn't a playbook. So it was quite. It was a really exciting time to be. I was one of the ones that switched sides. I went to join a venture capital firm as their vp marketing, thinking exactly that. Filthy Luca, here we come. Didn't work out that way.  

 
05:15 
Adrian Coxon 
Yeah, you know, and that's the thing. I mean, you were taking gambles to do it, but I think when you're a young person and your risk aversion's much lower, I think they're the kind of things you do. What's interesting at the moment, I think, is we're entering another period, another revolutionary period. I think there's been three, really, in the media space. The first was the Internet. The second revolution for me was social media. When Facebook and those companies came along, they allowed a different kind of communication with people and between people. And now we're seeing AI, which is another really. Obviously, AI is disrupting across all industries. But again, I see this is another wave of opportunity and creativity in our industry.  

 
05:51 
Dom Hawes 
So when Adrian and I met online to discuss this podcast, the subject Adrian wants to bring to the project, something we haven't talked about, but it's such an important topic, and that is basically how undervalued marketing is.  

 
06:03 
Adrian Coxon 
Yeah, I think you guys, back to the intro I gave when I first got into marketing and media. I saw that even then, the agency side was undervaluing the talent that they had compared to cmos who were working directly in companies. And that's why I switched from agencies towards client side roles. What I think is happening now is, again, there seems to be another squeeze on the marketing talent in terms of what marketing can do. How it's regarded in businesses and also how it's rewarded in businesses. And I think, I'm not sure why it's come about. I think because everything has become about digital and it's become very ROI focused. I think people are starting to benchmark what marketers do in terms of the output, that hard output that can be measured.  

 
06:45 
Adrian Coxon 
And I think we've lost a little bit of the magic of what marketing really does, which is it builds brand, it builds equity, it builds connections with audiences, and that's harder to measure. And I think we've kind of got ourselves in a hole. So in the old days, as an adage, you spend money on advertising, 50% of what you do is wasted, the other 50% isn't. And there was this kind of promise that we could work out exactly how the money was being spent, but we can't. I think that's the problem. We've got ourselves in a fix as an industry because we've come back and said we can measure what we do and actually we can't. We've been taken at word and now I think people are starting to think about us in that light.  

 
07:22 
Dom Hawes 
Yeah, the wannamaker paradox, that 50% is wasted is the root of all evil. We've got a whole podcast coming up about that, and we're also looking equally, on a different episode at innovation and efficiency and how they're mutually opposed marketers. We should be innovators. We shouldn't be all efficiency led. I think that's been one of the challenges that we've had. But marketing, like the discipline of marketing in businesses, seems to be undervalued, because I think the perception of what marketing is appears to have changed, too, maybe because there isn't such a formal, structured path for learning or creating it, that everyone feels they can do it.  

 
07:55 
Adrian Coxon 
Yeah, and I think you're right. I think there's the other side the marketing has always suffered from. Someone sees a great advert and they go, oh, a great tagline and they think, I could have done that. It's like something different with Apple. Oh, it's simple, obviously. Just do it. These are really simple concepts when they're presented. I think people don't understand what's gone behind the formulation of these ideas and the adverts that you create. And I think marketing suffers from that because anyone can look at the final products and go, that's nice. Can we have it in green, though? And I think, yeah, there's that eternal problem whereby with someone who, for example, in it and tech which is valued. You see the code, you see the end product, you see a product at the end of it.  

 
08:33 
Adrian Coxon 
And I think that skill is rewarded. The skill of a copywriter isn't rewarded to the same level, even though I think the putting together of the words is as complex and as skilled as putting together of code. You're coding a different way. You're coding in a language.  

 
08:47 
Dom Hawes 
A good copywriter will make something feel so accessible. I mean, that's the whole point. It's supposed to be able to go through system one straight into the heart of system two to actually impact us emotionally. So sometimes copywriting will feel very accessible, which is why people think they can do it. It's not all about this, but the salary scales in marketing do not appear to have moved on very much. There was a post on LinkedIn last week, someone posted their first paycheck as a copywriter from 1998, and it was 7000 pounds less than a copywriter would be hired on today. That's like 26 years later. It really hasn't moved on that much. Whereas if you look at the cost of living, look at the cost of property, it's a world apart. And so it seems to me that it's hard.  

 
09:25 
Dom Hawes 
Well, I know it is, because I run a marketing agency group. It's really hard trying to find talent at a price or good enough. Talent at a price that can do the quality of work that's required. Is this something you're seeing that you've seen in house?  

 
09:37 
Adrian Coxon 
I've had a bit of an experience in the company I'm with now. So what I've done is I can. I came in about 18 months ago and the first thing I did is I look at your competences, I look at the team's key. I'm a big believer that team comes first and getting the right people. And I did a job whereby I kind of stripped the team down a little bit. There were some people who weren't performing the level I wanted to and there was other roles I needed to fill just to get the team to do the job right. But what I noticed is when I came in is that the entire team were undervalued in terms of the renumeration. And this was just, this is within our industry, let alone, you know, against other departments in the company.  

 
10:12 
Adrian Coxon 
So I've been fighting hard for my team because I've said I've got the a team now. I've stripped it back. These are the people who are going to build the brand, these the people who are going to do the work. They're all excellent, I think, and I think excellence should be rewarded. And I think this company got into a habit of underpaying marketing and bringing in potentially people who aren't actually that good at what they do and so accepting a lower salary. And now I'm attracting the eight talent that pay gap, which is substantial in some cases, to actually go back to the business and say, we need to pay more. It's a tough one because they're going to say, what more do I get for this? Again, it goes back to they're trying to benchmark the outcomes.  

 
10:50 
Adrian Coxon 
So it's like you can give me the ROI.  

 
10:53 
Dom Hawes 
And over a short term, presumably that's the other challenge. So market is being the value creation engine of any business. Over time, talent will create value, but it's very hard to demonstrate that within one financial cycle.  

 
11:04 
Adrian Coxon 
Yeah, and I think that's another problem that we've got into, is this ROI. Everything's based on return on investment. And it's almost like we're competing with the sales team in some instances, but obviously not rewarded at the same level of sales teams. They're on a different kind of enumeration scale. So we're kind of being measured against a similar scale, but we're not being rewarded against that scale. And also, as you say, it's very hard to turn a cycle. Within a year. People talk about five year business plans, three year business plans. That's the kind of minimum. If you're trying to action some real change with marketing around the brand equity, the emotional connections you're making with people, it's a longer term game. And I think you need a CEO or you need a boss who understands what you're trying to achieve.  

 
11:46 
Adrian Coxon 
Achieve and the value of it long term. And maybe there's a role there that we're good at marketing our products, that is the things we're selling for our companies. But maybe we're not very good at marketing ourselves internally and educating the people internally around the value marketing brings, maybe that's part of the challenge as well. When you talk about marketing being undervalued, if you look at who runs companies, generally they don't come. You don't see many cmos ending up running a company. So you're talking to people who used to be the lawyer or the finance guy who ends up the accountant. It's the money and the legal guy. They're the ones that the city or the board wants to see in charge because they're solid and steady.  

 
12:23 
Adrian Coxon 
And you very rarely see a CMO who's flown up the scale and ended up running a company. So what you're doing is you're relying on those people having had exposure to marketing and understanding its value. And that's not always true. It's hard. How do you do that role? It's quite a tough question.  

 
12:41 
Dom Hawes 
Let's just hit the brakes for a minute and reflect on what Adrian just told us. You know, the remuneration thing is really a symptom. It's not the actual problem itself. It's a sign of a deeper malaise in an organization where there's probably going to be something like a structural issue. And sadly, it's pretty common. Like it's standard in every company for every executive to accept the importance of investing in decent financial systems, for example. Everyone gets taught that and no one questions it. But who's being taught the same kind of thing about marketing and who's championing marketing other than the CMO. Even then, as Adrian points out, the CMO in the marketing department might be doing a good job of marketing the company, but they're likely, probably not doing such a great job of marketing. The importance of their own work to their peers.  

 
13:28 
Dom Hawes 
Now, the net is you get lots of people who end up in leadership positions who don't have a genuine understanding of or value for marketing. They probably haven't got a Scooby Doo. And perhaps that's why the default setting is to attach an ROI value to marketing. At least then there's a handle, something to grab onto when they've been charged with making a judgment about it. In the cases where it's hard to do that, like such as determining long term customer preference, the value gets lost. And in the cases where you can do that, such as cost per lead, well, the value is diminished and it's short term. Yet marketing is central to the success of every organization. Marketing is strategy. Strategy is marketing. It's about how you take a product or service to marketing, and you can't just replace that with sales.  

 
14:20 
Dom Hawes 
So what is marketing's way back in those organizations where it got lost? What do marketers have to do to forge a better relationship with the way their own business operates? Let's rejoin Adrian and get his thoughts on this. On very important question.  

 
14:36 
Adrian Coxon 
For me, marketing encompasses everything and I use customer experience as an example. So for me, the customer experience piece I think marketing should own. And that customer experience is end to end. It's obviously the advertising, the awareness you've heard about the brand. You now know the brand you come through to transact, whether it's a website or an in store or whatever, the way you're doing it, everything you're doing, the design, the feel of that journey, you become a customer. How do you retain the customer? How do you excite the customer about, how do you build the emotional bonds with the customer all the way through to the customer, decides they may no longer want to work with you and asking them, why don't you want to work with us anymore? What's wrong? What have we done wrong?  

 
15:14 
Adrian Coxon 
Is he just not interested in the products anymore? Have you moved on? So that whole customer experience life cycle, I don't think any other department in the business can actually have an oversight of the whole piece. And I think one way for marketing to show greater value to the business is to start to look at the customer experience lifecycle and the customer journey as a whole and be the glue that can bring it all together. And obviously parts of that journey we don't own. So the sales guys will own a big part of the journey. They're the people who will convert the lead. Everyone in the company should be thinking about the customer first. If you're not thinking of your customer, a competitor will and they'll steal your customer from you.  

 
15:50 
Adrian Coxon 
And I think marketing's way into the, if you like, into the C suite and into the board and into the leadership of companies is through that route. It's actually taking what we know and expanding it up rather than trying to kind of push down into buying our media and sponsorship and the traditional marketing skills. I think we need to pull up and actually start to go, look, we're the people who understand the client or the customer best in this business. We're the people who have the overview of that. And I think at that level, that role, then internally, if you can shift that focus, then you start to get taken seriously by everyone. What I'm doing is I'm interviewing all my clients. I meet my clients, I ask them, what do they want?  

 
16:31 
Adrian Coxon 
What do they like, what do they don't like as a conduit to feed that back into other departments. You know, they don't like this feature. They'd like that feature that goes into the dev team goes into it. So suddenly the IT director's on board with me. There could be certain processes they don't like. So I'll go back to compliance and legal and I'll explain to them, can we not simplify this? And then that gets those people on board in terms of I'm adding value across the full business chain, rather than I'm just talking about, how are you driving leads today?  

 
17:00 
Dom Hawes 
We've got ourselves into a sorry place. You mentioned boards earlier. My observation of the boards I've looked at is if there are very few ex marketing people in the CEO seat, there are even fewer in the Ned seat. They tend equally to be like finance or ex CEO's, or they tend to be very much process and city oriented. And that's part of, I think, the short term focus that we've got. Everyone's used to chasing a quarter, and there's no one there with a voice that looks over the long term. And as you said, the entire customer life cycle is actually the duration that somebody needs to be talking about, because that's the purpose of the business, I think in the first place.  

 
17:33 
Dom Hawes 
We talked when we met while looking at evidence that marketing is undervalued at how short term people think, not just in terms of ROI. I don't want to go there because I rant about Roi being inappropriate a lot. Short tenures. There's one argument that says cmos, the shortest ten year job in the C suite. But generally speaking, the brands that do best are those that have cmos over a long period of time, six, seven, eight years, where they really get their feet under the table, where they can really drive a brand. But that's not the behavior of a lot of companies. Those shorter term companies, either they're changing their CMO frequently free, or they just want to shake the whole thing up every couple of years because they feel like they should be doing something new.  

 
18:09 
Adrian Coxon 
I was reading through the notes from the intro chat that we had. There was a conversation there, and I was starting to think, actually, you know, is it just a problem for cmos? Is it a problem for the wider companies? That companies are becoming much more short term and everyone is under short term pressure and we're just feeling that. In my view, cmos are a bit like the football manager. If things aren't working, if things aren't gelling, there's a sense of let's change. And even if things are working, sometimes they change the manager anyway because they want to tinker and play. I've been in situations where that's been evident, and it's a business culture. It's not necessarily just marketing. And maybe the problem really is it an issue only for marketing?  

 
18:48 
Adrian Coxon 
Certain companies are better at having stability across the board, but I do feel because the market's job is undervalued and it's one of the ones that people will tinker with. Maybe it's not a core value to the business. If a new CEO comes in, they want to change stuff up, where do they go? Maybe the marketing is the most visible thing to play and change with as well.  

 
19:07 
Dom Hawes 
Nobody said to me yet that the CMO role in the football manager our analogous I love that. It's absolutely brilliant. I totally get that. Except the football manager doesn't have any money to spend in its transfer season. It's like, how are you going to make better results when you haven't got any dough? It's hard. So one of the things that has caught my attention recently and I can't publish the research, but I can put a link to where it is if you want to get a hold of it. Gartner produced a report looking at marketing leaders most pressing challenges for 2024 and I just wanted to talk about some of those. They hit on what were talking about in the first part of today's show. They talk about the percentage of respondents that are citing particular challenges they're expecting.  

 
19:44 
Dom Hawes 
Top of all is short term execution oriented needs are impeding long term strategic planning. That's 61%. 43% say they've got a talent or a skill gap, and 39% say they've got employee change, fatigue or confusion among employees about priorities. Now, when you put these together, that is a sorry picture of a massively overworked business that's chasing a really short term flywheel and doesn't have the time needed to sit back and think about the long term. You were talking to me in the break. Very briefly, agent, about your experience where you're working with companies that do have meaningful brands and have invested in creating brands. So is brand the answer to this short term issue that Gartner is highlighting, or are there other reasons too for us to be pursuing more brand fame?  

 
20:30 
Adrian Coxon 
I think brand isn't the only issue there. The picture you're painting isn't great. The companies that probably aren't experiencing those problems are probably the businesses that have invested long term in their brands and products, and they're probably not experiencing those problems. One of the issues I've had throughout my career is when I've worked in recognized brands. So for example, Saxo bank. It's a recognized brand, globally recognized brand. When I was there, we did the Tour de France sponsorship. So people who don't even know our products or what we do, I wear my Saxo shirt. Everyone comments on it. All the cycling clubs everywhere, people the brand's famous. And what that does is when you've got a big brand, it makes the marketer's job so much easier. The ROI, the gritty stuff that people try and measure us on.  

 
21:15 
Adrian Coxon 
So the lead generation, the cost per lead, the conversion rates, the retention rates. I've been in businesses where they've come in and they've gone, right, do what you did at Saxo. And I've gone back to them and I said, right, we need to build the brand. And they go, no, not that, not that bit. The cost per lead bit and the conversion rates. Because what they do is they try and plug you into a calculator and go, well, if I give you a million pounds, how many leads could you generate? And, well, currently not as you think, but if I invest in the brand and invest in that customer experience, we'll move the dial. But that dial doesn't move short term. It'll take two, three years for us to see the dividends.  

 
21:51 
Adrian Coxon 
And I think people who are in marketing to do the role, people are excited about marketing, what marketing can do, that's what they want to be doing. They want to be moving the big needles. If you can't offer people those kind of opportunities and you, and as a company, if you can't bring people in and show them that you have a vision, you talk about, there's a confusion about what we're trying to achieve. Having a three year vision of where you're going with the brand and the products and the customer service piece, that's something. When you're interviewing people, prospective employees are coming to meet you. That's the stuff they're going to buy into, that's the stuff that's going to attract them and they're going to see the long term.  

 
22:24 
Adrian Coxon 
You're thinking long term and they're also going to get their hands on some sexy stuff to play with. It goes hand in hand. You back yourself in a corner, you try and chase your tail. You don't take a strategic view. You're not looking long term. And because of that, you're unfocused. People don't really understand what they're trying to do day to day. They haven't got a long term view of it. And I think that turns people off and I think you don't get the talent is marketing. We're in a cycle here and we're competing now with other industries and other roles and other jobs that I think could be more appealing because without that creativity, without that side of marketing, we just become a numbers job, and you can get paid more to do that as an actuary or an accountant.  

 
23:05 
Dom Hawes 
And with that, we come to the end of part one of my conversation with Adrian Coxon. Now, before we go to part two, I just want to share with you what all of this is clarifying for me. It's my kind of so what moment? And it's this. The role of the CMO, particularly when it comes to the promotional p of the four P's, should actually be pretty simple. Now, the ins and outs of the CMO job are, of course, incredibly complex, but the role itself, well, maybe that shouldn't be. I think it probably comes down to this. The CMO needs to be allowed to define the brand, to state, show or demonstrate what the brand should be like for its customers. And I'm seeing that definition as an objective. If you like, kind of like a mountain peak some way off in the distance.  

 
23:46 
Dom Hawes 
And having identified that objective and described it to everyone in the organization, then the CMO needs to decide whether any actions, pieces of creative work, customer scripts, yada, any marketing output, really, whether it fits, does it help move the organization towards that brand objective or does it move it away from it? Is the effort on course or not? Now, in essence, it could be that simple. Obviously, that takes quite a lot of doing. But once that objective and the system is defined, then a simple yes or no system has been created. And that clarity can then bleed through the whole of the marketing department, through all of its agency partners, and ultimately through the wider organization itself. Now, some organizations are really good at letting their cmos do this.  

 
24:30 
Dom Hawes 
I would argue the more successful organizations are, and some, arguably, the less successful organizations are not. It does take time. It does require consistency. To use Adrian's excellent football manager observation, you can't just chop and change. But nor does it mean that an organization has to get rooted to a single definition of itself. Because strategy and marketing and brand evolve over time. Smart organizations are always asking themselves, are we still headed in the right direction? Is this still right, the right destination for our customers? But the point remains, they have to have a marketing ethos built around a clear objective, and that objective is greater than any short term metric. Right? I think it's time for part two.  

 
25:17 
Dom Hawes 
So click play now to get Adrian's take on how to influence product, how to go global, whether Facebook's worth it, what he is doing with AI, and how going local can make you a more impactful marketer. 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.