111. Constraints and creativity: how ZF's Camilla Davison unlocks business's toughest challenges

If we are not delivering to the customer's expectation with respect to, you know, supply, then that's letting the brand down.

So, you know, the value proposition isn't just about the end product, it's about the entire experience across the whole journey.

And so once you've got an insight, then you're halfway there to influencing your strategy.

But the process of developing insights is, is not well, embedded in organizations yet or even in agencies.

Well, traditionally, and I'm going to be, I don't know, a little bit possibly contentious here.

Go on, give us a headline.

Welcome to Unicorny today.

I am your host, Dom Hawes and we are about to meet the marketing powerhouse that is Camilla Davison.

Now, these days she is CMO at Automotive Aftermarket, global leader ZF Aftermarket, but she cut her teeth in the razor sharp competitive world of consumer marketing with Kimberly Clark.

Now, she's going to tell you all about her own journey in just a minute.

But together today, we are going to set aside the usual thing we do, the frameworks, the strategies, all that kind of stuff, and we're going to focus on something altogether less predictable.

The unexpected insights that can quietly reshape how you think about marketing, but also about your business as a whole.

These are the kind of insights that emerge when you look past the obvious answers and start connecting ideas in new ways.

For instance, we often hear about the tension between short term profitability and long term brand building.

But what happens if we stop framing it as a trade off and start looking at how marketing can align these seemingly opposing goals?

Or take the idea of data in B2B marketing.

It's often seen as a limitation compared with the transparency and the reams and reams and reams of data that get generated in B2C.

But could this very constraint actually open the door to more human, more customer centric approaches?

We're going to find that out later, but we're also going to reflect on how marketing teams can step beyond their traditional role.

Not just communicators or the dreaded only one P, that promotional P, but how marketers can become agents of organizational alignment, building bridges between sales, operations, leadership and more.

So this episode, it's not about quick fixes or flashy trends, if that's what you're looking for, you might need to go somewhere else.

But what you will get today is a very, very thoughtful exploration and a deeper understanding of how you ask the questions that lead to better understanding.

So if you're ready to challenge the.

Way that you think about market your business, well, right now you're in the.

Right place, let's get started.

Thank you very much.

Thanks, Dom.

Very excited to be here.

Well, I'm very excited because I've seen a trend recently where quite well known and accomplished FMCG or I hate the phrase B2C but B2C marketers are coming to B2B and shaking up their approach to or the approach of the sector.

And we've only gone and got ourselves a live one in the studio.

I think I'm live.

Camilla, why don't we start.

Why don't you tell us a little bit about you and about your career and then we can go from there.

I think B2B is actually having a bit of a moment at the moment.

So I come here really proudly to sort of represent that segment.

But yeah, my first 15 years was very much B2C and I joined Kimberly Clark at a time and it was quite a long time ago that we were really fortunate.

We had really traditional marketing skills drummed into us on two or three, three year programs where as graduates we were given exposure across the business and talk some principles that quite frankly have been the sort of foundation for everything that I have done since with Kimberly Clark as well.

I was privileged to work on some of the strongest B2C brands that we have in the UK.

Andrex toilet tissue, Kleenex facial and I actually led the launch of Huggies Nappies and all of the baby care range in Europe during that period.

So super exciting brand, super exciting time.

And it really built a broad understanding of what marketing is.

But also it taught me to be a very commercial marketeer because marketing in Kimberly Clark had profit responsibility and that isn't always the case.

So in some ways we were sort of GMs for our brands during that time.

I worked in local roles, responsible for markets, I worked in regional roles and I worked in global roles.

And that's really important I think, because I would encourage anyone at an early stage in their career to do something similar because it gives you a very different lens on the business.

And I also worked in marketing roles and sales roles.

So again, trying to really see things from different perspectives.

From there I set up my own business, did something completely different for a few years and then when I came back I rejoined consumer Kimberly Clark again and they asked me, after a few years of managing the EMEA baby business to take those skills and build that marketing muscle in our B2B side of our business.

And at the time I thought, why would I want to do that?

I mean there's no real equity for our brands.

And nobody really understands the power of marketing in B2B, least of all ourselves.

But that was precisely why they wanted me to go there.

And it was such a fun journey, building that muscle, building the understanding of how valuable brands and brand innovation can be.

So I did that and then joined, followed our CMO into Tenneco Car Parts, quite a transition, very far from B to C and started to again build the, the Tenneco way of brand building and apply it to another B2B category.

Much more complex customer journey, much longer customer journey.

And really started to understand that you can have a passion for brands even in categories that you aren't necessarily interested in as you think, until you start to understand the insights around it.

And the more you understand about it, the more intriguing it becomes and the more connected you can feel to that particular industry.

And so now I've moved to another competitor.

I've moved to ZF Aftermarket.

Absolutely love that opportunity and the opportunity to really, you know, build an understanding of what the brands are.

In another B2B environment in a company that is largely driven by OE is the challenge that I'm embracing full on now, OE original equipment.

So selling directly to car manufacturers, for example.

But within that I am responsible for aftermarket.

So again, a very classic B2B model where the potential for us to really build the strength of our brands and the connection with our end users is up for taking.

Brilliant.

We might come on to that later.

We're going to, we're going to touch on a couple of subjects, innovation and organizational alignment and design.

But first I just want to pick up on a couple of things that you mentioned.

I talk a lot on this podcast about the difference.

One of the fundamental differences between the people that we build or create in business marketing rather than consumer brand marketing is, is the three years you described when you started at Kimberly Clark, where you get broad exposure to the business, you understand the metrics and you're starting to be taught about commercials from day one.

Yeah, so I think that's really interest interesting.

And then you talked about almost being a brand gm so having profit responsibility.

So in the business environment, often when people talk about profit responsibility, they're talking about an outcome of more often than not short term marketing activity akin to sales.

The way you described it sounded much more like the full marketing mix where you, where you are genuinely involved in price and product and place, not just promotion.

So I wonder whether, you know, before we get stuck into detail, whether you can comment on some of the differences that you've seen, not necessarily in the businesses you're in, but amongst peers that you now meet in B2B.

What are some of the structural differences between the way marketing is done in consumer and business marketing?

The fact that I had those three years in a company that really did hold its marketers responsible for a P and L has really helped me with respect to the company perspective in B2B.

Because B2B marketing is, it is emotional, but it's also very commercial, very rational.

And at the end of the day, you need to be able to converse with a value proposition that makes sense, makes sense from a commercial perspective for the business that is actually, you know, your target.

And so having an understanding of how you run a business, of how you drive profit growth, how you manage costs across the entire P and L, how you make decisions on resource deployment, on what you're prioritizing, and the impact of changing the dial on any one of those areas that has been crucial to refining the value proposition beyond just the most obvious levers that one can pull.

So I'm very grateful to Casey for doing that.

And you know, that's what B2B has over B2C.

The discussions that we're involved in and the breadth of the value proposition is more complex, it is more commercial.

The way that we're looking at the value to our target has to incorporate so many more considerations.

So if you haven't had the opportunity to really understand that in your own business you cannot speak with experience and authority to your customer.

Yeah, I think there are so many more stakeholders in B2B, particularly in an intermediated business or many B2B's will of course be selling direct and will be intermediated as well.

And therefore they have a whole channel they need to communicate with.

And the end customer they need to communicate with.

And even in the end customer, they've got a buyer group that they need to speak to.

Interestingly, as an aside, I saw the big thing at the moment everyone's talking about is buyer group marketing, which is obviously a revelation.

And I looked into this because I thought, oh my God, here we go, another three letter, three letter acronym, bgm.

And it's the revelation that sometimes when you're selling, you don't just market to decision makers, you need to reach influencers.

Yeah, the buying.

This is not new.

Yeah, exactly.

That's kind of what I was trained in in the 90s.

I think the one thing that's coming into B2B now, certainly as far as the companies that I'm representing over the last couple of years is a better understanding of the customer journey and trying to understand like who the customer is, who influences them at different points, who makes the final decision and who influences the decision makers.

So again, it was a B2C skill that we were using, as you say, 10, 20 years ago, but now we're beginning to apply the same thing in B2B.

So the equivalent, the B2B equivalent of pester power.

Yes, exactly.

Well, it's real, it exists.

Let's talk about some of the misconceptions about marketing.

Get stuck into the meat.

I don't know how seriously to take a lot of the discussion that one sees on LinkedIn because so often people are motivated by their own needs rather than trying to comment on what's going on, actually going on in the market.

But I do get the perception that marketing is very much still seen as tactical, a reactive function in many organizations.

And people don't take a step back and think strategy.

What are your observations at Casey?

Marketing led strategy.

And that built in me a belief that it was the right way to do it because marketing was the voice of the consumer.

And any strategy that isn't built on consumer needs, frankly, as far as I'm concerned is wrong.

When I joined the B2B companies that I've worked with, that was not the case that marketing led strategy.

It was very far from the case.

And as such, I really didn't feel that the strategy was customer centric.

And to be honest, we are trying to change that.

Sales has an opportunity also to change and needs to change because sales is seen as the voice of the customer.

But actually sales has historically had a very sort of close relationship with a few distributors.

And as we move to a more omnichannel approach, as we need to create pull as well as push from workshops in our case, as well as selling into distributors.

So we cannot rely on those five or six really strong relationships that we have with our key distributors.

We have to get a better understanding of how we drive pull for our brands, how we create that understanding of what's important and how we translate that into insights that can influence our strategy development.

And that's the role of marketing.

But it's not just the role of marketing, it's the role of the entire organization.

And marketing needs to have the voice that that influences the entire organization through being respected for its understanding of how we run the business.

And that comes right back full circle.

You know, if you've got marketers who only understand a very narrow dimension of the four Ps for example, and don't have the respect within the leadership team as a whole to be able to engage and have their, you know, seat at the table, then no one will listen to you.

And it doesn't matter how good your customer insights are.

You need to be respected commercially as being someone who can understand where the business is going and influence that.

Do you think that a misunderstanding or an underestimation of the importance of pull in some non marketing execs might add to that?

Our business is a typical example of how a push strategy has worked very effectively for decades.

Yeah, but the world is becoming more competitive, it's becoming more commercial.

Competition is becoming rife, you know, and it's not okay.

We need to have the power of our brands being pulled through the system and the company is recognizing that, but not necessarily recognizing how to manage that, how to build pull.

And it requires a root and branch change in the way that we not just market, but sell.

And the relationship between marketing and sales needs to change.

So it's not something that happens overnight and it's something that certainly I'm trying to lead by building those relationships and that respect for the entire domain internally and doing it in a very agile way.

You know, we have to iterate, we have to constantly just try things, test it, work with our colleagues in commercial excellence and sales, prove to them the value of doing something a little bit different and then start building that inner standard work step by step.

How do you bring your colleagues with you on that?

Because that's a lot of change.

I mean, a lot of change.

And we know that, we know the.

Transformation when you're going from a short term tactical, functional marketing department that really is just doing the promotion p to being more of a brand manager approach.

Because you are trying to create pull and you know, you've got a lot of stakeholders internally to bring along with you.

Yeah, I mean, how do you do that?

Not, not in one, you know, instant.

I grew up in an environment where understanding how you drive behavior change was fundamental to marketing.

And it's not just about the behavior change of your consumer or your customer.

You can apply the same principles internally.

So you've really got to understand at its most basic, like what's in it for me, you know, of the various different other leaders within the leadership team, how can you create and prove to them the value of doing something slightly differently and what is the value for them of doing that?

So, you know, from.

I literally dissect the leadership team and look at what would be the benefit to operations of us having closer alignment to them?

What would be the benefit to finance of us going on a journey that actually funnily enough, takes us closer to really understanding the return on investment of our marketing investments?

So trying to sort of dissect it and understanding where people are coming from and how the direction that you want to go on is actually going to help them is really the first and only stage that sort of helps them embrace the journey you want to go on.

Okay.

So that's your internal stakeholders and I get that by, by talking to them and sharing with them how collaboration drives success, helps customers.

Slightly different thing.

Yeah.

I was really captured by the definition of innovation that you gave me when we had our, our pre interview call.

You described innovation as creating new value.

Yeah.

For customers, which is probably, I mean, maybe that's part of the change conversation, but when it's customer friend phrased, it's about creating new innovation from.

How, how do you think that view differs from traditional views of innovation?

Well, traditionally, and I'm going to be, I don't know, a little bit possibly contentious here.

Go on, give us a headline.

Innovation was certainly in.

In the companies that I've spent the majority of my working life with, innovation was something that, well, engineers came up with.

Okay.

You know, and they came to marketing to say, hey, we've had this amazing idea like can you find a home for it.

It wasn't necessarily insight driven from our customer understanding.

Okay, so inside out rather than outside in.

Exactly.

And obviously innovation requires you to really have an insight that you can monetize, frankly, but you can monetize it in a way that creates value for your target, whether it's product, whether it's commercial value, whether it's an experience, something that is valued that is new, that they don't get already today.

So that is what innovation means to me.

Over the years, I think that the definition of innovation has been seen to extend it still something that I think is largely owned by engineering in a lot of these companies.

But how you commercialize it as a value proposition is the magic.

And that is something that marketing has to own and has to drive through insight and understanding.

And we can only do that if we have a really good understanding, as you say, of the customer.

And I often feel that we don't as a profession, certainly within business marketing, that possibly we don't spend enough time trying to understand our customers.

Yeah, I think that's fair.

I think that.

And it goes back to what I was just saying a little while ago.

Historically, we ran our business through having very strong relationships with our distributors and they had the relationship with the people who use our products at the end of the day.

And so we have sort of abdicated the responsibility to understand the people who are using our products true needs and how well they're being met to our distributor partners.

And we are not getting that firsthand experience and value of the relationship that our users have with the products or the brands.

And so that has had to change.

It's not something that, you know, is quick to build solid insight takes time, it takes investment to really try and get to the bottom of what's going to be valuable in driving your, you know, your innovation pipeline.

But it is recognized now that it is important to do and we're starting to do more of it when you're.

Kimberly Clark in the research I did before this episode, I went to my favorite friend GPT, I must find a pseudonym for.

But I went to ChatGPT and I thought, well, let's see what research we can find about Camilla Davison on Chat GPT.

So I asked a very simple question, who is Camilla Davidson?

And I got some really, really interesting stuff back that talks to exactly what we're talking about here.

It talks about some of the adaptive marketing you did when you were running Kleenex using real time data basically to allocate resources to areas where there was going to be immediate need.

And I looked when I was reading that first you'd be better find out whether that's actually what happened.

But when I was reading that, I.

Thought how would you in business marketing.

This is exactly what we're talking about.

It's funny, I didn't know where you were going to go with the sort of the research because you can imagine in a company like Kimberly Clark whose products are all about, well, dealing with body fluids, basically, whether it's coming out of your nose or somewhere else, the research can be quite interesting for sure.

And it's a company that really prioritizes getting beneath the skin of how consumers relate to the products, the brands and so on in terms of adaptive research and data driven adaptation.

The plethora of data that we had at Kimberly Clark on brands like Kleenex compared with what I have now in a B2B environment.

Environment is there's no comparison.

We used to be able to see our price to consumers in all the major retailers on a daily basis.

We have very little idea today of how distributors are pricing our brands to workshops.

You know, so it's a completely different world Equally, we would track things like the weather or, you know, if you're on Andrex, the incidence of E.

Coli, basically, I'm afraid to say.

Okay.

Because it would literally influence sales.

So we could ensure that, you know, whether it was promotional activity, display space or whether it was, you know, price.

The four Ps were intricately connected and we could literally modify, you know, the drivers accordingly on a pretty much daily basis.

We also had very close relationships with the key retailers and they were very able to adapt whatever it was that they were doing.

That channel worked really effectively.

It's much slower in B2B.

There is much less data transparency.

The whole understanding of the marketing mix and which elements are really driving sales is far less scientific and a little bit more art meets science.

You know, the whole way in which you create your plans, test your plans and learn is still relatively immature.

And, you know, it's an exciting area of development.

I think it's really exciting.

I mean, you know, we started out just a second ago talking about innovation and innovation has to come from insight and insight has to come from information and information has to come from data.

So we do need to do something to start thinking about how we can improve transparency.

Yeah.

And what I was really captured by when I, when, you know, when I was looking at the, that case study of, you know, asset allocation into areas where there's going to be need.

There's no reason, if one had the data in business to business marketing, that we couldn't be adopting some of the same tactics and strategy.

There's no reason at all.

Just the cost of collecting data.

I guess it is the cost of collecting data and it's the cost of not just collecting data, but making sure that internally you have the systems to be able to analyze it properly.

Yeah, yeah.

Because, you know, a lot of companies have grown rapidly, quite a lot of it, often by acquisition.

And the systems don't necessarily talk to each other.

You know, they haven't necessarily invested in the software that's required to make it really easy to use the data that you have.

So certainly in my experience, you know, there's an awful lot of reliance on what I would call tribal knowledge, which I really value.

But it cannot be the only source.

Of intelligence valuable in its own.

Right.

That isn't it?

Yeah.

Invaluable, I should say.

Yeah.

But you need data as well.

And, and then from the data you've got to be able to extract the correct information and then you need someone who can see an insight and then you've got to Try and root that insight in a customer need or in some kind of emotional or rational reason to buy.

And do we have those skills?

I don't think we do.

I think you convert data into insights by kind of combining data with a human truth as such.

And those two things together create an insight which is something that's really actionable.

Yeah.

Okay.

And so once you've got an insight, then you're halfway there to influencing your strategy.

But the process of developing insights is not well embedded in organizations yet or even in agencies.

And it's something that I'm constantly pushing on the relationships in the agencies that we have.

Because at the end of the day, quite frankly, I believe that your strategy is only as good as the insights upon which it's built.

And unless you're constantly refreshing that input of insights based on how the market is evolving, how behaviors of your customers are evolving, then your strategies aren't going to hit the mark.

They're not going to be able to deliver new value.

Do.

Yeah, and so, yeah, it's a, it's a constant effort of insight generation.

No, I think, by the way, I think that's a really important point and I think one that many people overlook.

They think like, we've done our research, now we're going to go and do a bunch of stuff and then they don't come back and validate and check.

But markets move really quickly, especially these days with social.

And everything's electronic and connected.

I think not enough people revisit their research often enough.

And some people don't do it in the first place.

They just think they know that the business because they've, you know, been working in it for decades.

So, and that's really dangerous because then you start, you know, pouring good money after bad.

So, yeah, you've got to come up with some kind of fresh insight upon which to, you know, build your growth plans.

But you just sparked a really interesting thought in my head there with, with that model of people that don't feel they need to research because they've, they've known the market for years and years and years.

There is a cohort of people out there, as I'm sure you know, building synthetic panels at the moment, which is a synthetic version of the people that think they don't need to do the research because they've known it for years and years.

And then the, the, the.

I think the proposition is that people like you and I would go to the synthetic panel and use that instead of our market research because it's faster, cheaper, Whatever else, but, but that's actually no different than going to the old sweat.

Who says I don't need to do research, I know this market and asking for an opinion is it.

Well, time will tell, won't you?

I hear they're getting like a 95% correlation with real research.

So there's a lot of excitement in that area.

But I'm not necessarily sure.

I mean recently we've been developing a new proposition and you know, there are many options available for research, you know, and costs differ accordingly.

But for me, one of the fundamental ways of testing that you cannot go ahead without is run it past some of the people who spend their lives actually talking to sales on a day to day basis or our sales talking to customers.

And you know, they won't be shy in telling you what you, you know, what they think.

And if they don't give you the green light for go ahead then frankly, you know, you probably do need to scratch your head a little bit more.

And that's a really good point actually.

We owe him everything.

It brings to memory a campaign I did a long time ago now, but we, we had a client, they were in the information business and they, the Internet was just sort of coming of age.

That'll give you a clue to its, to its how long it was.

And they had four or five products that they were selling and they were going to cannibalize them all with one new product that was going to be cloud based.

Yeah, big, big, big risk move.

Yeah, big risk.

I was an agency at the time.

I was saying consultancy was slightly different because I wasn't creating things, I was helping them answer or solve problems.

But we up anecdotally from speaking to their sales teams across Europe which we did all the time to try and find out what was going on.

And exactly the way you were talking that none of them believed in this product.

And so we had to go to the, to the board, the European board, this was an American public company and say you've got a major problem, you've got four weeks to launch, you're about to launch this product and none of your sales teams across Europe believe in it.

And so they said, well, okay, we're resource planning at the moment.

You've got 72 hours or something.

It was, I think it was about 72, maybe 48.

You've got something like 72 hours to prove this.

Maybe it was a week.

I might be exaggerating.

It's incredible as I get older how, how much harder the project seemed to.

Yeah, oh yes, obviously within an hour they needed.

No, it was probably a week.

So anyway, we had to go out and run surveys across all of the sales team and it turned out absolutely that they were not prepared to sell this thing.

So we then went into a training and, and a listening project to get them on board.

So everyone understood what it was, how it wasn't going to lead to a change in pipeline and it all went fine.

Well, I wonder what the insight upon which that was buil at the end of the day.

No, I do feel they are a very honest audience.

You can decide that you want to disregard it, but at least hear what they've got to say and why they're saying it.

And then, you know, you can decide which direction you want to go in after that.

Salespeople are, I mean, they're cousins, aren't they really, of marketing?

We're related.

Close cousins.

Close cousins.

But you also said something to me which I thought was really interesting about how marketing should act as the hub of the wheel.

Yes.

Within an organization, it's a connector.

Sales, finance, operations.

And we've talked a little bit about that today, people, you know, the HR function and HR and marketing and procurement.

Indeed, you know, we all need to work together.

Of course.

Talk to me about your hub of the wheel concepts.

What does it look like in practice?

Well, I just don't understand why anyone wouldn't think that marketing is the hub of the wheel.

Perhaps I'm a little biased, but the reason is because marketing is the voice of the consumer.

And at the end of the day, if that's not in the center of what everybody's trying to deliver, then you know, why not?

So marketing is about creating value propositions.

You can argue that sales has a closer voice with a customer, but marketing and sales have to be so closely connected.

They have to be able together understand the consumer, the customer, convert that knowledge into a value proposition and then work with operations to make sure that the product that's being produced is everything that that value proposition has and nothing more.

You know, frankly, they need to work with finance to understand how everything that we're investing on can be measured.

We know learnings from that and optimizing our return on investment the whole time.

You know, they need to work with every single function to make sure that what we're doing as an organization is strategically aligned to delivering that value propos to the customer with no waste throughout the organization.

And that's why marketing has to somehow be like an octopus, you know, and stretching and connecting with every other Function to ensure that's happening.

But it doesn't happen in every company.

We know it does.

It doesn't happen in a lot of companies.

Yeah, we know marketing ends up being told what to do at the end.

Of a chain or a label developer or whatever.

Yeah.

You know, what advice would you be able to give to people listening on how they can build, build cross functional relationships you mentioned a little bit earlier, but I wonder whether we can look into that in a bit more detail.

I mean every company's different and the reasons why it isn't in the place that it should be will be different in every company.

So first understand why, like that's always the place to start, like why isn't it?

But at the end of the day my experience and it has worked effectively in two organizations is about bit like convincing your audience to buy your product at the end of the day it's the same internally.

What's in it for them?

You know, what need does it satisfy that they may not even necessarily be aware of having in the first place?

So for example, recently the guy who leads our operations is not necessarily the first person to see the value in marketing.

Okay.

Thinks it's very fluffy magic kind of things and yet he's responsible for quality.

Well, at the end of the day, the customer experience that ZF stands for is quality.

Every single aspect of how we touch customers is about delivering quality.

And that has to of course be represented by the product, but it has to be represented by so much more than that.

However, if the people who are making the product don't understand what the brand stands for and how that can be conveyed in the way in which it's produced, then they're not going to think it's important.

So I am more than happy to go down to our manufacturing sites and explain about what the brand stands for and explain how important quality is and what quality means in terms of the, the specification and just build a bit of rapport with them so that they become more passionate and more advocates of, you know, what, what we're, what we're selling.

Do you think the concept of experience is widely accepted outside of market experience?

Yeah, the whole brand and customer experience unboxing and you know that the whole rap that, you know, that comes around.

A product, I think when people think about it in their own lives, yes, but they're very good at, you know, boxing and not applying that sort of experience in when they go to work.

So no, I think there's a big journey to be done in terms of it's not just about delivering a product.

It's entire experience from, you know, the call center right through to the packaging, right through to the supply chain.

You know, if we are not delivering to the customer's expectation with respect to, you know, supply, then that's letting the brand down.

So, you know, the value proposition isn't just about the end product.

It's about the entire experience across the whole journey.

And the way the finance departments experience marketing is normally a budget time when they're having to allocate a large chunk of cash to get into marketing.

And you've talked to me offline about developing a relationship with a CFO so that internal marketing, if you like, with the cfo, again, it's not fluffy.

It's about hard things.

You talked about ROI earlier.

How have you gone about talking to your CFOs about marketing as a spend?

I mean, I think that the relationship with finance is probably the second most important relationship I have.

You know, obviously I need to be very closely aligned with sales, also finance.

And it is partly to overcome the attitude that exists that marketing is the fluffy stuff.

You know, it's not actually.

It's the engine for growth, in my opinion.

But in order for that to be respected within the organization, we have to talk the same language.

So, you know, we have to talk financially about our investments and what their return.

And we have to start trying to make it less of a sort of art and more of a science.

Now, that's hard because it isn't easy to say, I spent this amount and this is what I got for every single penny of that.

But you can start that journey, and you start that journey by saying, right, what am I going to measure?

And you know, any strategy is about the what, why, when, why?

So you can start to align metrics to each of those questions.

And even if it isn't a 100% correlation between the metric and, you know, sales, start learning, start showing transparency within the organization, that you are prepared to be questioned, that you are prepared to be very transparent about how you're spending the money and about whether it was a good investment or whether it was something we've learned.

There's never a sort of bad investment unless you do it wrong several times.

But be open about it, have those conversations, start measuring once the measurement happens, start a B testing and looking and learning the whole time.

So it really is, as with anything about communication, about being very transparent about saying what you can do and what you can measure and what you can't, but how you're going to tackle trying to be more objective in those areas and really make sure that you've got people within finance embedded, your teams at every level so that they can challenge you and they can start to understand why is you're doing what you are and go back and be the voice of marketing in their own, you know, function.

I mean that's really interesting, you know.

I mean, you know, because we've had a conversation about it.

I have a rather dodgy history with the concept of ROI being used as.

A, as a measure.

But, but what I'm learning in the action in the last five or six interviews I've done and, and this conversation specifically is you're coming at that metric from a very different position than many of the marketers that I have seen.

I won't say spoken to because obviously at unicornly only the best come.

But because your starting point is a lot further back in strategy.

Well, it is in strategy development and because you have this kind of hub spoke arrangement internally.

It's a very different concept I think when you talk about ROI than when somebody who is at the end of a communication chain does.

Because where, where they are the coloring in department.

Yeah.

And they're having to talk roi, they can only talk about clicks, likes, those kind of stuff.

And, and that's fine because that's very transparent.

But I mean look at the.

You can't build a business doing it.

You can't build a business doing it.

You can harvest doing it.

Yeah.

And I think, you know, I think recently some people think that's what marketing is, you know, but there's a rabbit hole there.

Yeah, it's a very important part of marketing.

Absolutely 100 and likely to become even more important.

But it's not the whole thing.

Marketing for me is so much more, and it's so much more strategic than that and it has to be so much more influential than that.

That is a channel channel, basically.

But unless you've got a solid market marketing plan, fundamentally defining why you're using that chat channel and for what purpose, then you're kind of missing the point.

But many people do.

And I think one of the challenges is there was a rabbit hole there.

I nearly went down, but I'm going to skirt over it instead of going all the way in.

I think one of the challenges is that that bit is the bit that everyone sees and that's so that we sort of, we're inculcating with people that this is marketing and it's the, it's the, it's the, the Google Ads and, or you know, it mass.

It's the stuff.

And because they see so much of that but they don't see the strategy work going on, they don't see the work you're doing with operations to talk about quality or finance, to talk about return.

All they get to see is the output.

That's why they think that's what we all do.

And I don't know how we change that with a.

Within the wider organization.

It comes down in my opinion to some of those things that I've talked about a couple of times on, on, you know, today, which is voice of the customer value proposition development.

The value proposition is so much more than sort of executing through channel, it's about understanding how you play with price, what is the right promotions, how do you build equity versus influence short term sales.

You know, all of these things are considerations that you can cannot get a good perspective on if all you're looking at is a channel marketing plan based on digital, which is one aspect of the execution.

Camilla, I think that's a really good place for us to end today.

Thank you very much.

Lovely summary of what we've talked about so far.

It's time for marketing to move a little bit back in the food chain and start getting more strategic.

I think.

I certainly would agree with that then.

Tom, thank you.

Thank you.

Good fun.

Before signing off, I want to say.

A huge thank you to Camilla for.

Taking the time to come and see us in the studio here and to share her experience and wisdom with us.

Now I got a very brief snapshot of her diary when she was here and I tell you what, her workload.

Is not for the faint hearted so.

I really appreciate her coming to see us.

Let's quickly now recap some of the key ideas we discussed today and then I'll sign off.

So first we talked about limitations like fragmented data or competing priorities and how those can actually often become opportunities for creativity and human connection.

Now embrace those constraints, you may just find more meaningful ways of innovating in your business.

Not an easy thing to do, but at least Camilla's given us a pathway we can all follow to try and get there.

Secondly, we looked at the power of alignment.

We all already know that marketing isn't just all about campaigns and communications.

It's about about uniting sales, operations, leadership, that kind of stuff.

It's about delivering real value to customers.

But that kind of alignment, it doesn't come easily.

You have to work at it.

And I think Camilla gave us a really good insight into how she thinks about doing that and the prize if you get that is not just driving results, but building real trust across the business.

And we've talked about trust before on the podcast.

It's so important, I think we need to keep banging that drum.

So some really good takeaways I think for me today on building trust and how how marketing can, if you like, lubricate relationships throughout a business.

And finally, but again, by no means least, we explore the importance of thinking long term even when you have immense short term pressures.

And we're talking here really about balancing agility.

Awful word buzzword bingo.

I guess I just won it.

But balancing agility or the the ability, let's say to change with patience thinking longer term and how if you can balance that sort of flexibility and short term ability to change with a longer term view, that is how great marketers ensure that their endeavors deliver really lasting impact.

So a fabulous episode.

Thanks so much for Camilla.

I really enjoyed that.

And I've got some homework for you this week.

Take a moment to look at your own current marketing activities or your approach and ask yourself, where am I operating on assumptions instead of genuine insights.

Like what's one question I could ask my customers, my team, or even myself to uncover something that I haven't seen before and then ask that question the week after and then ask that question the week after and then work out how you can put it into practice.

If you do do that, you will.

Be building much, much stronger foundations for long term value creation.

Now, as always, we'd love to hear your thoughts.

You can Find me on LinkedIn.

My name again is Dom Hawes.

Or you can leave a comment for us on unicorny.co.uk and if you did find today's conversation valuable, I would be really grateful if you would share it with a colleague or friend.

Because building a smarter, more thoughtful marketing community starts with conversations like these and.

Starts with people like you.

Thank you so much for listening and we will see you next time on Unicorny.