Rip up the rulebook: how to make marketing fit for the future

Please note: This transcript has been created using fireflies.ai – a transcriptions service. It has not been edited by a human and therefore may contain mistakes. 

 
00:03 
Dom Hawes 
Welcome to Unicorny, the antidote to post rationalized business books. This is a podcast about the business of marketing and the entrepreneurial mindset. So join me as I talk to leading thinkers, leading marketers and senior executives to discover how they create value, capture markets, influence audiences, and drive business success. This is Unicorny, and I'm your host, Dom Hawes. In all the time it's taken us to produce the 30 od shows we've aired, I've been labouring under the misapprehension that everybody knows what marketing is. Actually, what I mean is that everyone agrees what marketing is. We all know what it is. But as it turns out, very few of us agree. We all think it's something different. And if we can't agree what marketing is, why should we be surprised when non marketers eye us with suspicion.  

 
00:56 
Dom Hawes 
I'm writing a whole show about that right now, which is going to air.  

 
00:59 
Dom Hawes 
Later in the year.  

 
01:01 
Dom Hawes 
But the AHA moment that led to the woefully under resourced research project that led to this realization, well, that was today's show. I invited two thought leaders into the Unicorny studio to discuss a subject that I framed like this. It's ground zero. We all know the market's tough. We all know yards are hard won. So starting from a blank sheet, how do you build a marketing function to deliver value in this market? And today I'm talking to Shane Redding and Chris Wilson. We're going to dive headlong into the topic. So coming up, we discuss getting the foundations right for a reboot, why organizational design, collaboration and team structure is key to success, and why any reboot in B2B has to allow time to enable the compounding of value creation.B2B needs to take brands seriously.  

 
01:55 
Dom Hawes 
Let me tell you a little bit about today's guests. You'll find their LinkedIn on our show.  

 
02:00 
Dom Hawes 
Notes at Unicorny.co.uk  

 
02:03 
Dom Hawes 
So first, Shane Redding is an independent consultant, speaker and trainer. She has, over 35 years, international business to business direct and digital marketing experience. Shane is a highly sought after thought.  

 
02:16 
Dom Hawes 
Leader in all thingsB2B.  

 
02:18 
Dom Hawes 
She's also, by the way, an amazing coach and mentor to many. And Chris Wilson is a business to business marketing specialist, cofounder and chair ofB2B agency Earnest. And he's someone who's championing the use of behavioural economics in B2B.  

 
02:34 
Dom Hawes 
Chris, by the way, is also one of the most thoughtful and self-effacing people in the business.  

 
02:35 
Dom Hawes 
After this very short but important shout out, we'll go straight to the studio to meet them B2B. Shane, talk to me. What's going on? Why is marketing in the doldrums?  

 
02:49 
Shane redding 
I don't think marketing is in the doldrums. The reason being. And I don't think it's actually just about B2B. I think we're in a massive societal, cultural, business political shift. We need to re-examine everything. And B2B marketing is just part of that context.  

 
03:08 
Dom Hawes 
I'm going to come back to that.  

 
03:10 
Dom Hawes 
I think, in a little bit, but I want to rein back a little bit. So you think there's nothing wrong with the way that a lot of business.  

 
03:16 
Dom Hawes 
Marketing is being done right now?  

 
03:17 
Shane redding 
There's nothing wrong if you want to run your business to business marketing for organizations that are of the past. If you wantB2B marketing to be fit for the future, you've got to rip up the rulebook.  

 
03:31 
Dom Hawes 
Okay, Chris, you're obviously at the sharp end in agency land. Talk to me about what you're seeing out there at the moment.  

 
03:36 
Chris Wilson 
Well, I wish there was a rulebook to rip up. This is my problem with that. I think that actually we need foundations in place. And if the foundations that were in place, and as Shane said, it's time to rip them up and move on, I'd accept that. But I don't because I think that actually so many of the foundations aren't in place. So I'm not going to disagree that the world is evolving and changing as it ever does. Shane will have a better take, I think, on me, on where that's going. So I'm interested in hearing on that. But I look at it as a function where there are some fantastic talented people. What has evolved positively is that we're getting better and better people into the profession, which wasn't always the way, that was always quite tough. But we're missing some foundations.  

 
04:22 
Chris Wilson 
I think we've got some big gaps. I think we've got some gaps at the top. At a strategy level, I see a real lack of strategy going on, not because there isn't strategic thinkers, but because people are not being given the time to think. And I think that's a huge problem. And then kind of at the foundational bottom level is we're trying to do innovative things when we haven't got the basics sorted.  

 
04:43 
Dom Hawes 
There's a lot changing at the moment, isn't there? I mean, quite apart from that kind of post Covid societal shift, we had a downturn on top of it and a war interest rates and. And sometimes I think it's tempting to think that, oh, everything's changed, we must reinvent everything. But these things tend to be know the pendulum swings backwards and forwards. It's not going to swing back this time, is it?  

 
05:07 
Shane redding 
Absolutely not. And this is why I think there's a real danger, and I am going to disagree nicely with Chris, that there are really good strategic foundations in marketing that have worked really well. The problem, and I think this is probably where Chris and I agree, is that they are not taught or understood amongst all marketing practitioners. And so there is a gap. However, I'm less worried about that now because I do think we're at this tipping point. And actually my worry about using frameworks that were fit for the past is they're not fit for the future.  

 
05:42 
Dom Hawes 
What kind of frameworks are you talking about?  

 
05:44 
Dom Hawes 
Strategy models in particular.  

 
05:45 
Shane redding 
Strategy models is a very good example.  

 
05:48 
Dom Hawes 
We're going to have to disagree here. Again, I have this discussion quite often. I was just listening to a podcast, actually on the way in to the office yesterday morning, where, bizarrely, a marketing person had done a marketing degree. Doesn't happen very often, but was lamenting.  

 
06:03 
Dom Hawes 
The fact that he had because all off the things he said that he learned in college were completely useless when he got into work.  

 
06:10 
Dom Hawes 
There's a difference here.  

 
06:11 
Dom Hawes 
So he is being employed in work on tactical execution, not in strategy. And what they teach in college is strategy. But the thing about good strategy models is they're just as relevant. Whatever happens, if you go back to their course, if you take five forces or you take value chain analysis, you may need to adapt how you create your output slightly, but the outcomes and the outputs from the model are still valid, I would argue.  

06:34 
Chris Wilson 
I'm going to go in a different path, I think, from both of you. I don't disagree with some of those foundations because for my sins, I've studied that, got the certificates, so on and so forth. So I still think there's huge validity. I think how you pitch that back to your stakeholders has changed. And I think that there's something in what Shane's saying around how society's evolved, how you communicate if you're a leader in a business right now, how you're going to communicate. Strategy, I think, has evolved, and I've seen that get into a point of how do you make it engaging?  

 
07:17 
Chris Wilson 
So the rigor becomes the thing that you start with, but how you bring that to life, how you make it engaging, how you bring people along the journey of people who've got zero attention span these days, maybe that's always been the case but you've seen that accelerated and that's been a lot of studies neurologically about how that's changing as well. So I think that the one big change, I think, is how you communicate these things. I would argue that I would still be using a lot of those very solid foundations that I think give me an amazing structural way of looking at strategic problems. But the way I'm going to kind of deliver the output, the outcome, the story to stakeholders internally, that includes, obviously we're an agency, so that's how we talk to clients as well.  

 
08:02 
Chris Wilson 
But how we help our clients deal with their very challenging stakeholders, my God, they've got worse over the last couple of years. How you bring them along the journey, I think that is an art form, actually. That's what's missing as well, I would say.  

 
08:14 
Shane redding 
So I think there's a nuance here. I'll take on board what you say, dom, about models being always applicable. I think the problem is, and it very much goes to Chris's point, it's the communication of them and the execution of them. And the danger is with those frameworks that we're all, those of us who do use them, so familiar with, that we default back to how they've been applied in the past. So what I'm sort of encouraging is, well, would a new model allow us to rip them up and think differently? And I'll give you one that just again to go. And I've spent all my career saying B2B marketing is different than consumer. Actually, I'm going to stop saying that now.  

 
09:03 
Shane redding 
And I think we should be more consumer and actually going forward, organizational change, we need to think about serving our business customers much more like consumers, and that would really help.  

 
09:20 
Chris Wilson 
I wonder whether you may have borrowed a bit of that off me then, because we set the agency out to do exactly that. There are, of course, huge differences between B2B and b2C, but what's always kind of angered me actually, is that can't be an inward looking, myopic, defensive way of looking at the industry that we're in or the part of the industry that we're in, because, my God, business people are still people, they just happen to be at work. So how you communicate with them is going to be very similar. And how you communicate with your stakeholders is also in that same thing. We don't radically change when we go in to work. The way we think, act and feel actually accentuates a lot of the sort of emotional system.  

 
10:05 
Chris Wilson 
One way of thinking it actually gets accentuated if you read a book called Herd talks about this, about how in group scenarios we lean more into that rather than we don't suddenly become more rational, we go completely the other way. That's going to be a really big shift in thinking, but also in priorities for today's B2B marketing organization. Because if you compare a consumer marketing organization and a B2B marketing organization, I think you would see that their priority list looks really quite different.  

 
10:35 
Dom Hawes 
We're talking about everything all in one at the moment. And I think there are two things going on here. So, the models and frameworks, often they'll sit in the background, right? So, they're not something necessary. I take your point. They're not something necessarily that you'll communicate. The challenge is how you take the output, the strategy you are going to follow and make that relatable. And I get that. I absolutely 100% buy. Also, your argument about attention deficit, that it's very hard to communicate and consistently with people who don't have very long attention spans.  

 
11:04 
Chris Wilson 
My belief though is that this has always been the case. I think one of the falsities of our industry has the mistaken belief that our end target customers actually look at what we're saying and read what we're writing and view what we're putting out there with the same level of interest that we do.  

 
11:23 
Dom Hawes 
Yeah, they don't give a monkeys do they?  

 
11:24 
Chris Wilson 
They couldn't care less and they just don't have time. Consumer marketeers have always known that. Let's use two opposing examples here, B2B. A big ERP system that is a company changing endeavour. You get fired or promoted based on how well that goes. So there's a lot at stake. Buying a toilet roll, not a lot at stake really. I mean let's not go too detailed in that. But there's not a lot at stake. But you think about the effort that goes in to promoting those. Far more effort goes into the toilet roll. Bizarrely, far more emotional endeavour goes into getting you to care about something that you genuinely don't really care about at all. And if you think about that, why on earth can't we flip that round?  

 
12:07 
Chris Wilson 
Why on earth can't we take something as amazing and as important and as interesting as this huge company changing platform and put the same energy into promoting that, than bizarrely, we do as an industry into toilet rolls.  

 
12:21 
Shane redding 
So I think one of the reasons we have a massive problem is product and Marketing have become divorced. So to Chris's point, nobody wants to buy an ERP system, you know, out know really passionate about buying one. No, it's what does it do for you? And I think there are some tech businesses that are around now that have challenged the approach. HubSpot is a brilliant example that came in allowing an individual to buy and in effect it got adopted across the organization because freemium model, very low price point and now they're selling up the value chain and they're now in enterprise. That model, that disruptive model started with the product. So that is what I think marketing strategy product should be really thinking about. How do we be more consumer and design new roles.  

 
13:13 
Chris Wilson 
So this is annoying because I'm starting to agree with Shane, which is really challenging. The other great example I completely agree on HubSpot is Salesforce, their real innovation. They had a number of innovations. One was a category reframe, but the other one was that the product could be bought by an individual on their company credit card. Back in the day, what a great way to seed that into an organization. And then, as you said, go up the value chain. I would say though my question out to our community and I'm going to include myself here. Product, that's a really big area. I wouldn't feel qualified, experienced enough to take product under my wing if I was running a marketing team. I think that's a really big shift.  

 
13:54 
Chris Wilson 
If we're saying that the other big one, everyone knows this because I bang on about it all the time, is pricing. If you're talking product, you pretty much have to bring the other pe involved, which is pricing. I think these are skill sets and experience sets that may not be right out there right now.  

 
14:09 
Dom Hawes 
I would go further than that. I've done some, albeit anecdotal research on this in the various groups I belong to, and pricing is not seen as part of marketing's core skill set anymore. There are specialist pricing departments or it sits in finance. But I 100% agree with you. So I agree also, by the way, about product. I would not feel qualified, but as the part of the organization that is supposed to understand, in Geoffrey Moore terms.  

 
14:34 
Dom Hawes 
Compelling reason to buy that has to.  

 
14:37 
Dom Hawes 
Feed up into product strategy. So I think marketing has to feed into product strategy. But I think product these days, particularly inB2B where it's so complex, it's not about a shrink wrapped product. It's something that has tentacles throughout a whole organization. I think that is probably too big for all of it to send to marketing. But marketing has to be at the table, and I'm not sure that it is enough. 

 
14:54 
Dom Hawes  
Shane rocked me right from the start today with her spot on observation that marketing itself isn't in any kind of a crisis. It's the organizations themselves, not their marketing functions, that are, well, they're becoming dysfunctional. Shane referenced the massive societal, cultural, business and political shifts we've seen in recent years, and by the way, she didn't even mention technology. Her point is basically that everything has been changing around us, but the old ways of running a business still persist. And I've hinted at this in past episodes, we're going to come on to that next, that kind of more evolutionary organizational design theory, and I'm planning future episodes on that, too.  

 
15:44 
Dom Hawes 
But as marketers, entrepreneurs and or leaders, this is really important, because if you want to sort out a function in your business, you need to cure the dysfunction first. So where is the dysfunction? Well, Chris pointed out that one of the most dysfunctional facets of marketing as a practice in business is that the foundations are seldom in place. We need a better, more consistent approach to training and development. We need to nurture and prize strategic skills. And importantly, we need to allow our people more time to think. We've talked about some of this before, and I'm sure we're going to come back to it again, but the industry needs a more comprehensive approach to professional development. Without that, the dysfunction persists. So we can forget about even talking of a reboot. Learn, then adjust is a much smarter way of improving.  

 
16:37 
Dom Hawes 
For those who've studied more theoretical and strategic tools and frameworks, Shane suggested they might be more use for the past than they are in the future. And that's something I encounter a lot. I argued that the tools and models taught in business school actually are timeless. If research is the starting point for good strategy development, analysis is what gets it going. And models like Porter's five forces and a thorough pest analysis, value chain analysis, Ansoft, the Boston matrices, even the most basic of all, the SWOT analysis, these models and tools, they don't date. It's how you apply them that matters most. Or so I thought. Just as important is how you communicate your strategy, how you bring it to life, and how you translate it to guide colleagues activity.  

 
17:25 
Dom Hawes 
Attention spans appear to be getting shorter, so we need to work extra hard to make the case for more strategic, longer term activities. This inability to think, plan and act over the long term is something we're going to come back to at the bottom of today's show. But next, I wanted to explore organizational design in a little bit more detail. When Shane said frameworks of the past don't necessarily work for the future. Part of what she was talking about is management frameworks, the top down hierarchical pyramid where requests go up and approval comes down. I kicked off this part of the conversation by asking Shane what the alternative is.  

 
18:05 
Shane redding 
So instead of departments, silos, specialisms, squads, agile squads, you have your pricing person, your product person, your marketing person, your salesperson in your squad. We've got to change because it's too slow when you're sitting separately. The brilliant Scott Stockwell, who's been on this podcast before, has a fabulous way of describing it as the new sort of airline model where you have flex resource. This is why I said that it's more than marketing. And I think the organizations that are going to win are going to rip up the organizational design of their businesses. They're going to rip up the rulebook, and they're going to start with a culture that is all about these squads.  

 
18:51 
Dom Hawes 
You're speaking to the converted with me here. There are many organizations who are doing this very well already.  

 
18:58 
Dom Hawes 
They're often cited examples of Bertzorg, the healthcare outfit in the Netherlands, and of course Handelsbanken, who operate in exactly this way. Maybe we can dive into that in a minute because I want to look at flexible resourcing because I think that probably is part of the answer. And having cross functional squads. Let's just explore those societal changes and the catalysts that are leading us to say that the old model doesn't work. Shane, when you say we should be designing for the future, not the past around squads, what are the key drivers that you're seeing that is changing how we work. 

 
19:30 
Shane redding 
What people want from their working lives. I don't think we'll ever go back to where I started in my career. There is now an expectation for much more flexibility, whether that's where you work, how you work, what work actually means. And that's why I think it's so fundamental. Because we know in our world our magic formula dust is people. It's people that make the difference to how we use technology, how we go to market, how we win. If we don't have the best talent, then actually we're not going to win. So we've got to, I think, put this at the center of what we create to be future forward. And that's not that elastic band of denying and going back to where were before. And that really means building something quite different and actually quite exciting.  

 
20:25 
Shane redding 
Because actually you can have the best talent wherever it is in the world. You can be always on because you can chase the sun. There's lots about this is super positive, but being really honest, there's lots of us who find that very challenging because it's not what we know.  

20:40 
Chris Wilson 
I'll add something into that. I don't think this is an agreement or a disagreement, but something that I've been quite interested in recently. One of the challenges organizations, I think they've always faced this, but I think this has gone to a breaking point level now is if you think about career paths used to be kind of linear, sometimes quite frustrating, but linear. You would become good at something, you'd get promoted in that thing. You'd then start to run a team, you'd then run a function, et cetera, et cetera. There's been some really interesting research very recently done around the generations coming into work, not actually aspiring to that. The idea of I become good at something, so then I start managing people. I don't want to be a manager. I don't want to lead a team. I don't want to do.  

 
21:29 
Chris Wilson 
Those are the new things coming through and I think that's really different. And I have no idea what impact that's going to have on our teams, on marketing departments in the industry that we're within. But that's a radical shift where the goal is no longer to get promoted, have a team, have a bigger team than the next person, so on and so forth. Because then you've got different paths. One of the great organizations used to have a really good way of modeling that path, not based on automatic promotion based on skill, but on aptitude as a manager or as a leader. Salesforce, another great example of where they pick people in their various teams and they don't promote them, but they put them on a course to see whether they would be good if they got promoted. What a brilliant way of doing that.  

 
22:24 
Chris Wilson 
Because just because you're a great practitioner doesn't mean you're going to be a great manager or a great leader. But my God, what's happening when people are saying, well, they don't want that path anyway? I don't think we're built for that yet. So am I agreeing with Shane on this? I think I am in a way. But what I am struggling with is how any organizations are going to try and manage that talent without frustrating that talent or directing that talent in completely the wrong way.  

 
22:49 
Dom Hawes 
I think there are a couple of things here as well for me.  

 
22:51 
Dom Hawes 
How does that talent get the basics learned is one of the challenges. And I'm not talking about hybrid working here because again, I couldn't really give a monkeys about whether people in the office or not. I'll sort of come back to that. But increasingly, the very basics won't be done by people. Well, not by people in our office. They'll either be done offshore or they'll be done. A lot of the basics eventually will be done by machine.  

 
23:11 
Dom Hawes 
But how does a person learn when. they come into a business, the basics, if they don't go through that apprenticeship type model? And we don't have answer for that yet, like you, actually, Chris, although I'm anti hierarchy person, particularly because I think the best general managers aren't necessarily the best functional people. The best general managers are by very nature generalists, not specialists, and it's a very different skill. But it's very hard to manage an organization, particularly where there are expectations from your customers on delivery coming in a certain way, and you want to try and break that model. That's really hard. And unfortunately, in the marketing industry, for example, clients want to see someone with a fancy title talking to them when they come to a meeting.  

 
23:53 
Dom Hawes 
That has to change. That has to change, because actually the best person to do that role might not be the person with a job title of account director or group account director.  

 
24:01 
Chris Wilson 
And currently I do not see progress being made in that particular. I think it's going the other way.  

 
24:06 
Dom Hawes 
I agree with you, we're constantly berated for pitch teams, but.  

 
24:09 
Dom Hawes 
Like, every single client that we work with will operate the equivalent of a pitch team. They put their best people into the sales process who are good at selling functional, and then they put their best people in who are good at delivering functional.  

 
24:21 
Dom Hawes 
It doesn't have to be the same person yet.  

 
24:22 
Dom Hawes 
There's an expectation when it comes to agencies. We want to be able to see the people we're buying. It's crap.  

 
24:27 
Shane redding 
So on that, there's three things. I think the first thing is, I believe there's a model that is starting to emerge that's very exciting about how people will get their knowledge going forwards. And it's not the apprenticeship within a business, it's the community apprenticeship. And we're starting to see that with things like propolis for B2B marketing, where this network of client side marketers is supporting other client side marketers. And actually, the big breakthrough for me, and it's always been the case when I've done professional training and qualifications, is I can stand up and talk about something, but when somebody sitting next to you goes, that's exactly the same problem I've got. And then they get together and they have the copy and they share it and it's there. It's out there on YouTube or whatever. There's lots of self learning.  

 
25:18 
Shane redding 
But the bit I think that really helps embed learning is when you find your tribe and you're able to share your experiences. Now, the danger with that is that it tends to be layered and therefore you're only getting that experience from your peer level. Not maybe, and this is maybe why we have the gap around strategy, because they're not getting the chance to interact with those who would be able to lift their heads and go, yeah, you're doing a really great job down here on sorting out what a proper MQL should look like. And this is our experience. But actually, where does that fit in the business strategy? So how do we enable this web of expertise to be more available, really?  

 
26:05 
Shane redding 
So that's one point, the second point about who do I want in the room and who do I believe that if I'm going to win any business I want, the subject matter expert doesn't matter whether it's an engineer, doesn't matter the salesperson, but it's the person who genuinely will solve my problem. And that's addressed in the Jolt Effect. And that book is brilliant on the whole way the buying process is broken.  

 
26:33 
Dom Hawes 
It is brilliant. You made me read it. In fact, you made me read it twice because the first time I put it down because I got a bit bored, frankly, after the first couple of chapters and you beat me and made me go back and read it. And it is good. But the subject matter expert, I mean, which subject and at what stage of the campaign or lifecycle or challenge? If we're talking about cross functional teams, if we're talking about Scott's airline model, where you have a core team that could be cross functional and you augment it as you need to. Very difficult to deliver, by the way. And again, there needs to be some technology somehow to underpin that. I'm not sure it's there yet.  

 
27:07 
Chris Wilson 
I would also argue that so many organizations, if they tried to do that tomorrow, would end up with chaos and nobody staying in their lane. I don't like that phrase at all, by the way. Staying in a lane. But where I've seen it go wrong is where it's a pile on. Everyone feels like I've got a role in that, I've got an opinion in that, actually, that creates total chaos. So it's not that I don't buy the idea. I think the implementation of it, I mean, that's a very new world for me personally.  

 
27:39 
Shane redding 
And that's why I think this isn't something you retrofit. This is something where you are starting with a blank piece of paper. Businesses that are starting tomorrow will be much easier. So what I'm saying for those of you who've got legacy organizations, watch out because the businesses that are going to come and eat your lunch will not be structured like you because they can. Now some super smart organizations, and in fact, this is addressed in one of your favorite books in Crossing The Chasm, actually do rip things up and say, we've got to start again. So you see this coming out of growth teams in some marketing departments that are allowed to be very experimental, do things in a different way. But they're also absolutely, to Chris's point, they're sort of protected, they're ring fenced and they have really clear objectives.  

 
28:27 
Shane redding 
KPIs and they're allowed to break things. Really important, but very clear roles and responsibilities within that team. So that's a great place to start if you haven't got one, have a growth marketing team.  

 
28:39 
Chris Wilson 
You do often see that in large organizations where they're trying to launch a new thing or even a new business within that large organization, they create a kind of entrepreneur led scale up. And you do get a very different modus operandi in that organization, but very different people. My other concern on this is you are often going to fail if you ask the same people who've got the same personalities to then flip into a new way of working, because they might not be the right people to do that. The way they think, what they care about, how they operate with their peers, stakeholders, colleagues, et cetera, may not be suited to that. So potentially not just are we ripping up the rulebook, but we're looking for a wildly different set of people.  

 
29:25 
Dom Hawes 
So we are bizarrely going to talk about exactly this subject next week with the amazing Geoffrey Moore. So next week we're getting him back to talk about Zone To Win. And zone to win is his playbook for how enterprise does exactly this, dividing the business into four zones, productivity and performance being like today's horizon one, a transition zone being what's going to be in place in years, maybe two, three, and then the incubation zone, which is what you're talking about, entrepreneur, totally different culture, totally different type of people, autonomous within the organization, and there's lots going on incubation, but only one thing goes through transition at once. He'll tell us next week, but I think you need to be at something like 1% or 2% of revenues to come out of incubation into transition.  

 
30:06 
Dom Hawes 
And you come out of transition into productivity and performance when you're at 10% of net revenues. And that's how large organizations like Salesforce and Microsoft have managed to innovate. Well, but for smaller businesses it works just as. And you know, I was thinking actually Shane, where you were talking there about this isn't evolutionary for a marketing department in an organization. If they want to build for the future there needs to be some disruption. They could use the same model, choose a team to market a product or service, put it effectively into incubation, build it differently, run it differently, prove the case, and then one product or service.  

 
30:45 
Dom Hawes 
At a time change the model.  

 
30:46 
Chris Wilson 
We've actually seen that with a client of ours. So they are launching a very new thing in a market that they're in, but just not in that particular area. And they are doing it very differently. And it feels like a different business, but it's within the business. So I think that's a very good call out.  

 
31:02 
Shane redding 
So this is super exciting for me because the one thing we haven't talked about is actually what that means for us, marketing to our customers who've adapted very different models to the ones we're used to marketing to. So take that. Brilliant. And I love it. So I'm very excited about the next episode. When do I want to market to the entrepreneurial team to get them to try something that will help them build a new product? When do I want to market to the scale up team and how I do that is going to be very different. And everybody who knows me knows I will not finish a podcast without talking about data. The data and insight that we need now and we've got available. We're not looking enough at organizational structure to understand where we should go and land.  

 
31:56 
Shane redding 
We just look at the business, we just go key account. We're not thinking in building our propensity models about how that business works.  

 
32:07 
Dom Hawes 
Look, it's a good point. I think it's very easy for a marketing team to get lost in itself and in its own objectives and to lose, potentially lose connection with where the business is going. Now if there's an innovation or an incubation zone going on, that might be.  

 
32:24 
Dom Hawes 
Because they don't know about them, to be honest that is a discrete distinct unit. 

 
32:25 
Dom Hawes 
Maybe it is a marketers challenge. If the strategy is changing, the rest of the business needs to communicate that back to marketing. So that marketing and its agencies, by the way, we always talk about marketing as though it's just an in house thing. But the model of the future we haven't even discussed yet when it comes to agencies and clients has to be a much closer integration, I think. So we're talking about a combined team, but there has to be regular communication.  

 
32:49 
Dom Hawes 
I think back from the business, not Least, for example, on what actual business objectives are being met or not or contributed to. 

32:50 
Dom Hawes 
I'm not sure how much of that goes on in the really big, well organized companies. Of course, it does. But in SMEs, when everyone's scrabbling around for resource and things are tough, I'm not sure.  

Let's change lanes a little bit. Let's talk about today's tactical approach and that kind of belief that you've got to build always on systems that underpinned by half a billion technology products and the cost of that.  

 
33:20 
Chris Wilson 
So I think if we're ripping up the rulebook on marketing this year, I think one of the things that we should take a pretty brutal assessment on is our martech stack. In fact, I wouldn't even call it a stack. I would call it a kind of jigsaw puzzle that hasn't been put together yet. I think that, and I have seen many times that organizations have a lot of platforms, a lot of tools and are majoring on a few of them. But the others they're still paying the license for in tough times. And let's face it, this year will be tough from a budgetary point of view. Let's kill off some of those licenses. Let's simplify the stack. Let's focus on the ones that are really adding value. I know that's not easy because some licenses are longevity wise, not going to play into that.  

 
34:03 
Chris Wilson 
But let's be really brutal. What's really moving the business forward from a technology point of view, because half of it isn't.  

 
34:09 
Dom Hawes 
I'm not going to argue with that. That's a very quick way to waste budget twelve month in advance SaaS contracts that don't deliver.  

 
34:16 
Shane redding 
Let's be honest about this. This is where we have some amazing technology vendors doing amazing marketing. But this is a call out, stop marketing your platform, that it does everything. I am seeing some really worrying trends of tools, which might be workflow tools for internals starting to be used for marketing automation campaigns. That is not their core functionality. There is, as I completely agree with Chris tech blot, get rid of it, go on a low fat diet and you'll be much better for it, healthier and fitter and saving money. But the other thing is, don't use the wrong tech for what you need to do. How is it helping your customer?  

 
35:07 
Chris Wilson 
I feel for marketing teams on this one because they are oversold every day of the week and we have to go in and undo some of those sales conversations because we just know that some of that stuff does not deliver the outcomes that the vendor has been saying it does.  

 
35:24 
Dom Hawes 
There's a challenge to tech marketers here, actually. The people marketing those stacks in the first place.  

 
35:29 
Dom Hawes 
A. stop over promising and B. make it as easy to get out of those contracts as it is to get into them. 

 
35:32 
Dom Hawes 
Because we've all been in a situation.  

 
35:36 
Dom Hawes 
I'm in one right now.  

 
35:38 
Dom Hawes 
I'm not going to name it because they've got more lawyers than me where.  

 
35:41 
Dom Hawes 
I want out of a contract.  

 
35:42 
Dom Hawes 
Because we haven't used their technology for twelve months. I missed the renewal date by one day and they're now telling me,   

 
35:49 
Dom Hawes 
I’ve got another twelve months to pay, or.  

 
35:51 
Dom Hawes 
I can pay in advance for the next, whatever it is to get out of the contract. It's absolute garbage, that kind of behaviour.  

 
35:57 
Dom Hawes 
They don't give a toss about customer.  

 
35:59 
Dom Hawes 
Success, they've got a department called that.  

 
36:01 
Dom Hawes 
But they don't give a toss about.  

 
36:02 
Dom Hawes 
Them, and that has to change.  

 
36:04 
Chris Wilson 
So if you follow Shane's rip up the rulebook approach, that model of licensing does not fit with that. So we need to change that.  

 
36:15 
Dom Hawes 
It's garbage.  

 
36:22 
Dom Hawes  

Organisational design, it's an enormous subject It's something that we will come back to again and again throughout this year, because it's absolutely fundamental to the kind.  

 
36:28 
Dom Hawes 
Of transformation businesses need to go through if they are going to continue to grow and create value. Now, how the practice of marketing fits into that new kind of organization is right at the top of my mind at the moment. And a high level takeaway of the conversation you've just heard is that it's very clear that modern marketing is not just about promotion, it's not just about promoting products. It's about understanding and connecting with customers on a much deeper level, utilizing technology and data to drive things, having the agility, the responsiveness and the resilience to react to what our customers want, see, need, think and feel. Our markets are changing really quickly, so these things matter. Here's how I think about it. Businesses get organized around the technology that's available to make them productive.  

 
37:17 
Dom Hawes 
When many of today's businesses were designed with enormous hierarchies, hero leaders and rigid rules, the technology was pen and paper and the postal service. And when things are that slow, you need tight controls. Telex, fax and mainframes increased the speed of mission critical computing and communication. But they weren't accessible to many, so the same structures survived and thrived. These structures were the hierarchy we've discussed, but also things like siloed departments, think fiefdoms, budgeting processes, policies and procedures. It's why the computer says no more than yes. The thing about all of these things is they're internal. The customer doesn't know about them and certainly doesn't care about them beyond acknowledging that you have a governance framework. And then we got personal computing, pre world Wide Web, of course, and that started to change things.  

 
38:08 
Dom Hawes 
Suddenly we all had personal computing power on our desks, and when connected on a local or wide area network, we had the ability to cooperate and collaborate across functional boundaries. This was the first opportunity we had in business to redesign our organizations around customers'needs, not our ability to operate. But it wasn't until the web appeared supported by SaaS applications, that we all got properly joined up. And that's where we are today. But still the same functional boundaries and dysfunctional management structures, frameworks, controls and processes abound. There's loads of literature now about how.  

 
38:47 
Dom Hawes 
Business needs to reboot with new models, cultures and management styles. 

 
38:49 
Dom Hawes 
All of them are underpinned by good, solid systems thinking. So we need to start thinking of marketing less as a function or department, and more as a way of selecting and connecting with customers on a deeper, more joined up level. And by the way, your customers are facing exactly the same challenges. Things like, how do we take advantage of the synergies between personalization and data driven decision making to create better targeted activity for more effective outcomes? And how can we reorganize to create cross functional teams that serve our customers better and give them the autonomy, technology and tools they need to act without having to ask permission. And the big one? How do we rethink, measure and report value creation over the longer term and lose our slavish civility to this quarter's numbers at the expense of all else?  

 
39:45 
Dom Hawes 
And that's what I used Chris and Shane to round off today's show.  

39:50 
Chris Wilson 
I can't see anyone wanting to lurch from one short term goal to the next tactical push. Let's get sales in next week. Well, the sales cycle is 18 months. That's clearly not going to happen. Marketing teams are under that insane and stupid pressure to deliver. Impossible there and at ignite. In fact, both ignites this year and the Chicago one and the London one, this was talked about a lot about the inability, despite wanting to build long term, always on programs, the inability to do that because of the lack of stability at a budgetary level, budgets get removed. You're trying to set up a twelve month program. By the way, twelve months is tiny, short. If you've even got a nine month sales cycle, you do not need a twelve month plan, you need a five year plan.  

 
40:46 
Chris Wilson 
But we're struggling to get to that at the moment because no one is putting stability at a budgetary level, which then rips the guts out of any plans you've got. Having said all that, I think with some clever language we can make that happen. I think we've got to be very careful about the language we use to describe the programs we're building in our marketing functions to the stakeholders. For example, brand as a marketeer, I love that word. I believe in that word. I read books about that. I watch things, I listen to podcasts about that. Don't go near stakeholders with that word. Maybe use the word reputation or something like that. Something that means something to non marketing people. In B2B organizations, you have to do that. You do not have to do that.  

 
41:34 
Chris Wilson 
Funny enough, so much in consumer organizations, because if you are selling toilet rolls, the business gets the importance of brand. They get all that because you don't have a sales force that goes out and sells toilet poles because they wouldn't be very well paid for a start. But to get to that long term program activity, I think the two things are, one, change the language about how you describe them so that they align to what non marketing people care about. And I think that getting that right is absolutely critical because at the moment those long term initiatives are falling on barren ground and budgets get pulled. So they start and then they stop, so on and so forth. And that has to stop.  

 
42:15 
Dom Hawes 
We don't know anything about start stop, do we?  

 
42:18 
Chris Wilson 
2023 was the year of start stop and I cannot do another year like that. That's crazy.  

 
42:24 
Dom Hawes 
Apart from the damage that businesses do to themselves when they create budget take it away, create budget takeaway, they're killing their agency partners. Absolutely killing them. I have to say from my day job, as you say, this year has been brutal for exactly that reason.  

 
42:39 
Chris Wilson 
Our clients have found it just as tough and some of them are under obscene amounts of unreasonable pressure. And we've got a mental health pandemic right now. And it's this behavior that's driving, and.  

 
42:52 
Dom Hawes 
It'S not just marketing. By the way, I spoke all my corporate finance colleagues are saying the same thing. Everyone who is involved in any kind of consulting business, service or project or.  

43:02 
Dom Hawes 
Service delivery is saying the same thing. On, off, on, off, on, off.  

 
43:06 
Shane redding 
So we're going to see. We've all had the pain, the agency pain, but what about our client pain? Because we've abandoned them. We started, got them all excited and then the budget got cut. Never hear from them know. So I think this is why this recalibration. I really love what Chris is talking about there, about using the right language. We've got to be thinking much more about the effect and the impact on our customers by just this stop start and what it does to their reputation. How does our reputation? Because if you look, and we have. I love history, you look back at the history of organizations that in previous times have got through tough times. It's often the private businesses, it's the companies like JCB who openly talk about the fact that they've been able to continue to invest.  

 
43:59 
Shane redding 
Who's got the best performance out there at the moment. JCB are one of them. Double profits in the last two years. So that understanding of the damage to a company's value because you've not continued to keep the lights on, if you like, is really important. And this is why brands coming back, I think brand. I'm really excited and I'm not a brand marketer. I'm learning loads about the genuine value of the brand to a balance sheet. It's really powerful.  

 
44:33 
Chris Wilson 
I completely agree with that as a brand marketer. So dangerously, I'm starting to agree again. If there's one thing, I think one message we could land around this brand thing, beyond just maybe tweaking the language around it sometimes, is that whatever you're doing this year doesn't pay off this year, it pays off next year or the year after. And just getting people to think like that, or to realize that, or to have expectations like that, changes the game completely. Because if we're promising things that are coming back within our fiscal, that's crazy because it's completely going to bite us. It is about building future value, even landing the point. This is all about next year. We have to start there.  

 
45:12 
Dom Hawes 
The thing about long term value as well is the return is not linear, it compounds cumulative. It is cumulative. So, yeah, so the longer you stick at it, the more you do it, the higher percentage return you get.  

 
45:23 
Chris Wilson 
I agree. So maybe we need to, because I love reframing, I love taking other industries and then applying the way they think, act, frame things into ours. Maybe it's like pensions and day trading. Pensions is our brand marketing. This is our future. Day trading, highly volatile, could get quick returns, but also quick losses. Maybe we start thinking like that.  

 
45:48 
Shane redding 
And actually that fits very well to the model that you were saying coming next, those four teams. Actually, you could align that really well.  

 
45:59 
Dom Hawes  
As marketers, entrepreneurs and business leaders, one of our biggest challenges is to derisk and optimize the interplay between short term performance and long term value creation. And as you know, that is highly complex. In today's conversation, we hinted at and then articulated in no uncertain terms, that an essential element of modern marketing is agility. If you want to overcome the challenges of the long term and meet short term demands of customers and businesses, you have to increase the responsiveness and agility in your business. It's not just one thing or the other.  

 
46:38 
Dom Hawes 
You can't be polar about this.  

 
46:40 
Dom Hawes 
And ESG is a perfect example. Top of the pups before the downturn, ESG's pretty much disappeared from the must do for many. But the need for equality, sustainability and good governance, well, that's more acute now than it was before. But our short term attention is elsewhere, so it's just disappeared off the agenda. But embracing sustainability shouldn't be a response to consumer demand. Neither should equality or governance. These are all essential investments in your brand's longevity. Similarly, strategic partnerships seem to have lost their shine with many over the last 18 months. They're often seen as a long gameplay. Partnerships, though, can have an immediate impact on your customers experience. Partnerships not only enhance your service offering, if you do them well, they also improve customer engagement and experience.  

 
47:31 
Dom Hawes 
So while they may not always put pounds in the piggy bank, partnerships and the enhancement they bring you can increase stickiness. And that is a short term win. Because the first rule of sluggish markets is don't lose your customers. In any recession, downturn, stagnation or slowdown, financial prudence emerges as the bedrock of sustainable strategy. Now that might not be sexy, but it is true. And we've all seen, and we discussed earlier, those start stop funding patterns. We've all had to struggle, and we've all had to come to terms with budgeting and market uncertainty. But start stop is the antithesis of prudence for your brand investments to mature and yield dividends, which compound, by the way, you need to secure a Runway. If you're not confident about the longevity of your budget, scale back your ambition, downsize your Runway, but keep the activity on track.  

 
48:25 
Dom Hawes 
Consistency, or lack of it, is much more visible and confidence shattering than a scaled back approach. This kind of budgetary responsibility as well enables us to invest in our people and platforms consistently, creating a virtuous cycle that supports both our immediate needs and our plans for future growth. The longer we commit to a cohesive strategy that balances our short term wins with our long term ambitions, the greater the returns we will get and the greater our influence will be in our businesses. This approach isn't just about being better marketers or entrepreneurs, it's about redefining the value of marketing within our organizations and to our stakeholders, showcasing that the true measure of success isn't just in immediate returns, but building an enduring and highly valuable legacy.  

 
49:18 
Dom Hawes 
Next week I am back in the studio with the incredible Geoffrey Moore to talk about an organisational framework to enable all that we've talked about. Today we're dissecting his book Zone to Win, which lays out a playbook for organizing your enterprise to maximize performance and productivity without stifling innovation. That is all for today, though, folks. Thank you very much for your time and I will see you next week.  

You've been listening to Unicorny, the antidote to post rationalized business books. If you've enjoyed the show, why not hit follow? We'd love you to rate or review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and it only takes a few seconds, but it means a lot to us. Or if it's easier for you, please recommend us to a friend or post on LinkedIn. Tagging at Unicorny I'm your host, Dom Hawes.  

50:11 
Dom Hawes 
Nicola Fairley is the series producer, Laura Taylor McAllister is the production assistant, Pete Allen is the editor, and Ornella Weston and me, Dom Hawes, are your writers. Unicorny is a Selby Anderson production. Now go win the future.