16. Why is marketing being excluded? With Georgina Gilmore & Joel Harrison

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

00:03 
Dom Hawes 
Welcome back to Unicorny, the antidote to post rationalized business books. This is the podcast for senior executives who want to find out how other businesses are building value through marketing. Last week on Unicorny I was joined by AML Group's Ian Henderson and we spoke to Mark Evans, who is the former MD of Marketing and Digital for Directline. And together we talked about advertising. We discussed the amazing Winston Wolf campaign, the campaign that revitalized Directline and the decision to transformer it at its peak. Oh, that's a terrible pun. You're only going to get it if you listen to this show. We also discussed transactional trust versus relational trust. Mark explained his choose your future philosophy. It was a great episode, so if you missed it, well, you don't need to lose out. Go back and have a listen. Today we discuss how business to business senior marketers are being sidelined from strategic initiatives.  

 
01:03 
Dom Hawes 
We explore the impact of Data obsession on their focus and their exclusion from critical areas of the business, like mergers and acquisitions. We enter today's show by offering tips on value creation during tough times, by leveraging marketing, naturally. Our guests give expert advice on how CMOS can reposition themselves in the C suite for strategic involvement. Now, that's a big show, and I hope you're holding on to your hats. Let's jump right in. Georgie, hi, and welcome to Unicorn.  

 
01:31 
Georgina Gilmore 
Hi, thanks for inviting me here, Dom.  

 
01:32 
Dom Hawes 
We're very welcome. Now, look, while researching the show, were struck by how you had joined some of the best known brands in the world at pivotal moments in their evolution. Can you maybe take us back to the beginning? Tell us how and where you cut your teeth as a marketer.  

 
01:47 
Georgina Gilmore 
Yes. So, complete mistake. Three day temp booking at Apple Computer in, I think, 1990. Went into work in the PR department as a temp, and on the third day, I was offered a job at Apple. I stayed there almost five years and left as a marketing manager. In that time, I would say Apple was the kind of foundation of everything for me. Not only did I make amazing friends, lifelong friends that have stayed with me as friends and work colleagues throughout my career, but also the innovation and the creativity that was afforded there and the ability to be different. And, yeah, did some great stuff there. Launched Apple into retail, believe it or not. I launched the Macintosh performers into retail across Europe. Launched Quicktime, the first MacBooks, and the first ever PDA, the Newton message pad. What we did to do that was groundbreaking as well.  

 
02:39 
Georgina Gilmore 
Subsequently onto Kodak, where I launched their digital cameras across Europe and digital services, and then led on to Telco. I worked for Vodafone, where I led their enterprise marketing. Another leap into another industry, into Cybersecurity, where I worked for Kaspersky. Since then, I've worked in N Energy and some other SaaS brands as well. I think it's always been technology that's really interested me from a B two B marketing perspective.  

 
03:08 
Dom Hawes 
Okay, you marked it through the digital revolution, so you've seen a lot of change, and I want to ask you how you think marketing has changed over the years. When I'm asked that question, I normally have to start by qualifying it. I'm just going to do that first. We talk about marketing, we could be talking about any of the three following things. Marketing is an industry, marketing is a discipline. Marketing is activity. Actually, there's a fourth as well. Marketing is a department. Most people talk about the last two. They're thinking about marketing either as an activity or as a department. Those things are all driven by marketing as a discipline. I e what is marketing, and that's what I'm most interested in. Do you think businesses opinion of what marketing is as a discipline has changed over your career? And if so, how?  

 
03:47 
Georgina Gilmore 
Some companies, yes, but not nearly enough, quite frankly. I think, unfortunately, still a lot of companies view marketing as a cost center and something that is at the end of the road as something that needs to be done, the comms function. Ironically, I think marketeers are to blame for a lot of that misperception. Whilst marketers like to sometimes woe, and I've been there myself, why is everyone questioning my value and what I'm doing? It's because marketeers aren't actually understanding where the business is coming from a lot of the time, and not positioning stuff in a business language and talking kind of marketing speak too much.  

 
04:23 
Dom Hawes 
Georgie, thank you so much. I think that's laid some excellent foundations for the discussion we're going to have later today. Joel. Welcome to the Unicorn studios.  

 
04:30 
Joel Harrison 
It's fantastic to be here. Thank you for inviting me.  

 
04:32 
Dom Hawes 
Well, I have to you've been banging the drum for B two B marketing since 2004. That's nearly 20 years. The activity, or your focus of activity is now Propolis. Would you explain? What is propolis's purpose? How is it developing? Give us the lowdown.  

 
04:45 
Joel Harrison 
Propolis is a platform. It's a community intelligence platform. It's a closed community where the idea is that B, two B marketers can come together to learn, share and grow and develop and be more successful together to create that safe space where marketers can come and talk about the challenges that they have can learn together, can ask candid questions of each other and get solutions from each other with the help of knowledgeable experts like Georgie. And increasingly, very soon. I'm very glad to hear Selby Anderson as well. It's an excellent place where you can ask those questions that you feel uncomfortable, necessary asking with the wider world and get that peer to peer engagement and support, which is great for CMOS, because what I know about CMOS is that they really value that peer to peer engagement. They want to get understand what their peers think about things and build that network.  

 
05:25 
Joel Harrison 
It's great for marketing managers and marketing execs because they want to get practical solutions to their problems. It's got a host of resources and training and content within that regular activities. So really exciting place. And we're seeing this. This is the future of what the old school publishing industry has evolved into. We were a print magazine when we launched 20 years ago and this is our latest development. We still do conferences, we still do events, we still do a great awards program. This is the core of our brand right now.  

 
05:47 
Dom Hawes 
So we're really excited. But thanks for that overview you. We're going to link some details in our show notes which you can find on Marketingdifference Co UK. We're talking to more and more leaders about the existential crisis in B to B marketing. Right now, b to C marketers generally have a different worldview because their senior leadership teams seem to get the importance of brand not so much in B to B, but is it our fault? Georgie, earlier you mentioned you said you thought it was Joel. What's your view? You've been banging the drum for B two B for 20 years nearly. What are you seeing?  

06:18 
Joel Harrison 
I think Georgie is entirely right about the state of B two marketing and the fact that marketers could do better. I do just want to state though, I do think we've come a tremendously long way in 20 years. I think if you look back at what marketing was like in 2004, it was to a great extent the coloring in department, it was the golf umbrella buying department. It's not anymore. It's moved on from that. We can definitely go further and Georgie is one of those wonderful individuals ho's at the kind of the cutting edge of what needs to happen and really gets a bigger perspective. To your point, you questioned on what do we need to do and is it marketers fault. I think Georgie's right. Marketers need to do better and be clear about how to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.  

 
06:51 
Joel Harrison 
I think the crux of it, ironically, marketers aren't very good at marketing themselves or communicating. They don't understand what messages they should be delivering to which audience. The C Suite audience is a particular kind of audience and need to talk to them in the language they understand in the way that is relevant to them, not seek to talk about marketing problems and challenges. They also need to educate the next generation about how to do that as well because they're even less informed about that and they often see it as a very microcosm of their own challenges on a daily basis. We all need to be part of the solution, bringing the industry forward. That's about basically eating our own dog food or drinking our own champagne is a nice way to put it.  

 
07:25 
Dom Hawes 
I listened, I should say, to an episode of the Sweathead podcast with John Evans, uncensored CMO anchor, talking about some of the work that he does, mentoring and helping CMOS develop. I was really surprised that he said two skills that were really lacking in CMOS were, number one, an understanding of business finance, and number two, an understanding of influence, both of which I would have thought, as a marketer, are probably an elementary building block. I think they speak to a blog you wrote last year, Georgie, called Stop Talking Marketing, Start Talking Business, and we're going to link that on the show notes, but could you maybe give us a summary of your thesis?  

 
08:03 
Georgina Gilmore 
Marketers talk a lot about the performance of what they're doing and not in the context of what the business needs them to do. They get very excited I've been very guilty of this, getting very excited with my lovely presentation to the board or the executive leadership team about how many website hits we've had and how many visitors to stand, et cetera. That means nothing to them, and what they are hearing is blah, I've been spending a lot of money, blah, and what they're not hearing is how it's materially impacted and affected business results. CMOS that I've worked with and that I work with now, they are very much kind of excluded sometimes from some of those financial discussions, those business discussions. I do think the onus is on them to help themselves and their teams start to develop that and start to be more commercial, perhaps, in their thinking, because that's the only reason that they're there to impact the business results.  

 
09:06 
Dom Hawes 
One of the problems, I think, is in the tools that we all decide to use to communicate the work that we do. Dashboards work of the devil. Joel, do you feel strongly about the devil that is Dashboards?  

 
09:22 
Joel Harrison 
I completely agree with the perspective that you can have this paralysis through analysis, where you're looking at things and trying to exhaustively and extensively, and you just get drawn into this world, the matrix, where all you can see is the rest of the numbers. I'm slightly cautious about being too derogatory about them because I think in so many instances, marketers don't use enough data to inform their decisions and there isn't enough evidence of the right data being used. I think you've got to strike the right balance. A quote which rings very true in this instance is from Rory Sutherland, who I'm sure we all know is Executive Director of Ogilby and a tremendous character in every sense of the word. My favorite quote of his is, all data comes from one place, the past. And that's beautifully put. It would be from a creative person who wants you to think more about creativity than necessarily the hard numbers.  

 
10:04 
Joel Harrison 
I think it's unarguable that you can't get too obsessed with that because buyer behavior, particularly in this current world, is changing so fast. We've got to be a bit more agile and fleetive about it than that.  

 
10:13 
Georgina Gilmore 
Yeah, I agree. Again, what I have observed working in corporate, certainly in the past ten years or so, is an over obsession with data and as we all know, it's never completely correct. Everyone will have an opinion on whether it's right or not. You'll spend 4 hours arguing around the board table about that and then people will go away and crunch the data. Again, a lot of time is sometimes wasted on doing unnecessary internal tasks and my view is that's too much of an inward looking approach to business, look at stuff that is important to the business and measure it as simply as you can and then take a view on it. It's about taking action from those insights rather than delving into more and more of those insights until you try and find the answer that sometimes you want to find. I think too much of this internalization can sometimes inhibit actually going out and executing and driving the market.  

 
11:10 
Georgina Gilmore 
I know so many marketers and I've led teams where people, their hearts drop when they know there's a big board presentation coming up because they're going to spend hours and weekends preparing and finessing and what a waste of time, quite frankly.  

 
11:26 
Joel Harrison 
One of the challenges of that as well is that when you've got a board or a CEO that's not particularly marketing savvy or marketing friendly, and you've got a sales director who can come in and say, well, I spoke to our biggest customer and they said this, and that will trump your biggest compendium of data you've ever seen. Because the anecdote wins every time. I'm not saying that means that we should stop doing data, I think we should be doing both as well. It's frustrating that those anecdotes are so powerful and you've moved on to spent so much time money collecting all that data and it counts for nothing.  

 
11:54 
Georgina Gilmore 
Yeah, marketing should be looking at the data within marketing and perhaps not exposing so much of it to the rest of the organization because that's where then suddenly everyone else becomes an expert marketeer and we've all worked with those people who are suddenly wonderful at creative or wonderful at messaging, et cetera. That's fine, but you're in a job to do something and they're in a job to do something. I always have this philosophy of stay in your lane, right, because we're here to do a job and to respect each other's capability. Marketing need to look at that data and that insight within marketing and not necessarily share what I think is marketing data that means nothing to non marketing teams.  

 
12:36 
Dom Hawes 
One of the problems, maybe we talk a lot to tech companies, and I know that's where you spent your career is that there's a myth among engineers that you don't really need marketing if the product is good enough. Actually in the world of B, two B SaaS now kind of that's almost becoming true where marketing, there's so much information, so much data about usage that can come back through the product that maybe engineering and marketing moving closer together, maybe.  

 
12:58 
Georgina GIlmore 
Well, I think that product organizations and marketing in really successful companies that I've worked at do work very closely together. The market requirements, if you like, of a product being developed or a technology being developed, comes from marketing insight. Marketing are actually there at the very early inception, working with Rnd on what's going on in the market, what competitors are doing, et cetera, taking customer feedback. So, whilst I like the kind of stay in your lane, do the job, ultimately you all work for the same business. Whether you're in R and D, sales or marketing, you should all be focused on the customer and the customer experience and the whole customer lifecycle. Whether that's from product development right through to a SaaS renewal and crosssell campaigns and upsell, et cetera, and advocacy, everyone has a role to play in that. So it's not exclusive to one function.  

 
13:54 
Dom Hawes 
Well, this is an excellent point from Georgie. Marketing is not its own entity. It's not even in a symbiotic relationship with the rest of the business. They're part of the same organism, an organism designed to serve the customer as well as it can. The quicker that both marketers and nonmarketers stop seeing their business as siloed, well, the quicker that business and its leaders will be able to realize their full potential. You're listening to Unicorny with Dom Horse, powered by Selby Anderson, the marketing group that helps complex businesses win the future. Coming up on the podcast, we dive deep into mergers and acquisitions. Why so many fail, how they affect both customers and employees, and how to do transactions correctly. We also discuss why under communicating to your customers is such a problem, and how marketing can bring real value over the next twelve months. Before all of that, I wanted to ask Georgie if it's true that CMOS aren't very involved in mergers and acquisitions, and if so, whether it's a problem.  

 
14:57 
Dom Hawes 
Here's what she had to say.  

 
15:01 
Georgina GIlmore 
Oh yeah. I mean, it's happened to me so many times. Actually, the worst thing is when you get a call from one of your team, perhaps the head of digital saying, just being contacted by the head of legal or the CEO at 11:00 at night saying, got to change your website tomorrow. A, that's really embarrassing because you don't know anything about it. B, suddenly everything is thrown up in the air and unplanned and what the impact of announcement of an acquisition or a merger is going to be? I have worked for companies that have done it that way, which, quite frankly, I just don't understand. On the flip side, I've also worked for companies who do it brilliantly and I think companies like Vodafone do it really well. Maybe that's because of also their background in B to C that they understand how to do that type of thing better and they value brand more perhaps than B to B does.  

 
15:51 
Joel Harrison 
I think that's the crux of it, isn't it? While they appreciate naturally that marketing has to be so permanent in that process, whereas in B to B, marketing is playing catch up, admittedly, some places further to catch up than others. I was staggered. I think you were on the roundtable we did a few months ago about M and A and I thought it'd be a niche topic. It was absolutely not a niche topic. Just about everybody there was either currently going through an MNA or recovering from one still in the putting the repercussions or preparing for one, or had the other scenario you said, where they'd had something just dumped on them. It's so prevalent, it's happening all the time and often it feels like in the same way strategy gets you're just doing one reorg and then the next one hits it's doing one MNA and the next one happens.  

 
16:29 
Joel Harrison 
To your point, the crux of this and these marketing needs to demonstrate its value so that the C suite understand the role it can play in that much earlier on, I mean.  

 
16:37 
Dom Hawes 
When we started discussing this, I actually didn't even know it was an issue. We do a lot of M and At the very earliest stages, when you're looking at deal origination, the starting point of that is where is our strategy going? How is the product going to develop? How is the service going to develop? What plugs do I need? How am I going to complete my product? Those are marketing questions. Even right at the very first stage of origination, one would think that the strategy team would bring marketing in to say that where's the product fit with these companies? I'm literally staggered that it doesn't happen.  

 
17:06 
Georgina GIlmore 
Yeah, I think it tends to be quite a closed group of people finance, legal and perhaps some external support. I read somewhere recently that between 70 and 90% of MNAs fail. One of the big reasons is things like poor communication and really bad program management and project management of the process of the MNA and the decisions taken earlier on about the right fit. Ironically, those are all areas that marketers are brilliant at. Again, where I've seen it work really well, marketing have actually had a good relationship with a strategy team or perhaps even strategy so when I was at Vodafone, my team was responsible for business strategy and planning and understanding what the market's doing. So customer insight, market insight. Also product marketing. People in product marketing can start to look at customer numbers, understanding what a customer base looks like, understanding where the potential value is in the future and what the competition are doing and having that knowledge inside an organization and not applying that knowledge just seems to be daft, quite frankly.  

 
18:16 
Georgina GIlmore 
I think there's a huge amount of value from the very beginning that marketing can add even through the screening process.  

 
18:24 
Dom Hawes 
It strikes me that there may be a system one, system two thing going on here that the legal and the finance teams are very much thinking. System two the rational, this will make sense. We'll have X territories, we'll increase our market share by X percent. Actually you got to get through system one first and the people that are involved in it, the day to day people who are involved in it are all system one. The best people in an organization are understanding human behavior, instincts, reaction is the marketing department comes down to trust, doesn't it? Yeah.  

 
18:49 
Joel Harrison 
Do they trust that group or those stakeholders in that marketing function to participate in that conversation or are they still treating them like an execution or driving sales driving leads function and it's a reciprocal onward journey of greater trust, greater value.  

 
19:03 
Dom Hawes 
What about due diligence? I mean that's really important as well. You got a deal, you found a deal. At some stage you got to dig into the actual business and say is this is it what it says it is? And is it going to work? Where do you think marketing's role is in that?  

 
19:13 
Joel Harrison 
At that point they're about understanding the customer base and about the alignment of products and about the practical implications of it. It seems to happen more often but I don't know Georgie, but I got the sense there was of how much they're really able to derail the process at that point is moot. I guess it depends on the circumstance.  

 
19:30 
Georgina GIlmore 
Yeah, I think once the train has left the station sometimes it's very difficult to get it to slow down or stop. And actually that's why as well. In many ways, even having R and D involved or your product development organization is important. Because if they're owning, ultimately the roadmap and marketing is helping inform that roadmap going off and deciding to buy company X. It's completely at odds with the roadmap, but it's just because they've got a really good customer base where's that decision making happening. Ultimately, as you said Dom, it comes down to strategy. Again, I've seen a lot of companies who are buying two or three businesses a quarter and kind of chucking over the fence to marketing at the last minute and they're integrate this and they're still having to run their own marketing engine and marketing machine. On top of that, it's a completely.  

 
20:23 
Joel Harrison 
Cavalier attitude, really expecting these things are going to work. The more ambitious they're the merger, the more significant they are. If you're doing it repeatedly on repeat cycles and you're asking for trouble, all sorts of reasons why marketing is important early. The danger is they might say something which I don't want to say the finance guys, but those people who are maybe playing at that field don't want to hear and then marketing doesn't want to be seen as being the naysayers. There's an edge of, again, acquiescence and promising to deliver something which you can't do. To a certain extent they're kind of a damned if we do and damned if we don't scenario. What often this comes out to my mind to being about as a CMO, understanding the ethos of the organization you're working for. This the place that I feel I can succeed and make a genuine difference or am I going to be bashing my head against the brick wall?  

 
21:06 
Dom Hawes 
As you said, Georgie, sometimes when you get that kind of deal frenzy, particularly if you've got a lot of deals to do and it becomes a numbers game, then sometimes the subtleties of the deal and isn't it going to work, fail. I think one of the things that sometimes gets forgotten is the customer. I mean we're all meant to be orienting ourselves to our customers and our markets. Marketing is supposed to be the voice of that customer. How many people actually they genuinely, when they're looking at a merger or an acquisition, say what does this mean to our customer? They tend to think about themselves, I think more than the market or the customer.  

 
21:36 
Joel Harrison 
Also I'm not suggesting that's not important for a second because of course it's important, but before you get to the customer it's the employee base. That's one of the areas where marketing has a critical role in terms of communicating with both teams, keeping people on board, keeping people informed about what's happening, why it's happening, when it's happening. And that aspect of it is critical. That's why they need to be brought in terms of that planning stage, coordinating all the different stakeholders, bringing them together, setting expectations around the first hundred days. Because if you don't have that group on board aligned, you're going to really struggle to get the customers on board.  

 
22:05 
Georgina GIlmore 
Absolutely. That's the time actually where you lose a lot of your talent as well, either from your company or that perhaps the company you're acquiring or merging because they all jump ship because the communications are handled so poorly. Again, sometimes I've worked in companies where I work very closely with the HR function and internal comms to do that right? To make sure that we got the strategy for press analysts, shareholders, employees, customers, partners, et cetera, and making sure that you've got a comms piece right up front that is working through the whole program.  

 
22:41 
Joel Harrison 
That is absolutely what should happen in that situation. That the thing. I believe what we conclude the best thing to do is to be honest that you don't know the answer to this and to be as clear as you can all the way along the line because saying nothing is not an option. Telling people that you'll give them what information you can and you're working hard is the best strategy in that far from ideal scenario.  

 
23:00 
Georgina GIlmore 
The other thing, of course, is customers. To your point earlier, Dom, if you don't communicate properly both to your existing customers and also the customers of the company you're acquiring or merging with and making sure that you've got the right positioning to them, you're over. Communicating to them is so key. It's, again astonishing. I've seen clients that I work with who just have left their customer base go off into the yonder and of course the competition are loving it because they're jumping all over their customers. Particularly now at a time like this where we need to be wrapping our arms around our customer base and thinking about customer retention, it's so key.  

 
23:43 
Joel Harrison 
We live in this era, don't we have expectations are so high and people are so quick and able to share negative experiences that it's not an option anymore. If you're failing to communicate about what you're doing, you're leaving people feeling fed up and disenfranchised with you, then you're asking for trouble. It can be a business ending moment, can't it?  

 
24:00 
Georgina Gilmore 
Absolutely. You wonder why your churn is going through the roof in a webinar.  

 
24:05 
Dom Hawes 
As in last night, it was a webinar for private equity backed CEOs and something that then popped up. That because of PE still needs to deploy and that the market is depressed and there are companies that are distressed? MNA is likely at some stage to go on the rise. From a marketing point of view, that means not only you're going to be acquiring new product and service, but they might be crap. So marketing plays a really important role. Buying value cheap is really hard and to try and do it without a marketing lens, the voice of the customer, without an understanding of communicating to your people, if a company is distressed that you're bringing in, that's like double jeopardy, isn't it?  

 
24:38 
Georgina Gilmore 
Yeah, it really is. I think it can feel like a supermarket suite for a lot of finance directors, et cetera, thinking, let's go out and buy. Buy if they've got the kind of cash and the backing to do that. Like you said, the company's valuation might be much lower than it was a year ago and it's a bit like do you need it or do you want it? And again comes back to your strategy. If it aligns to your. Strategy then fine. Just buying something which by the way as well, imagine buying a company that's going to destroy your brand because of their brand reputation that you haven't really looked into or their customer base that is just so unhappy with a bad product experience. Again, you're right, that's where marketing can really help. Look in that early screening level.  

 
25:26 
Joel Harrison 
I mean if you're thinking about doing an M and A without getting marketing in at a very early stage, you're asking for trouble. There are so many ways it can come back to bite you, but also on a positive level, there's so many ways that marketing can add value to that conversation. It might say some things you don't want to hear but you'd rather be hearing them than not hearing them. You pay twice as much in relative terms or other costs further down the line. The cliched view of this is a bubble of egos and without a lens that's providing a customer's perspective on this and that's exactly what your marketing should bring to the conversation.  

 
25:55 
Dom Hawes 
We like to end each of our unicorny episodes looking into crystal ball and time. Today is definitely marching on. It's a time where we're going to ask you both please to think about the future. What advice would you give to marketers who want to continue delivering value to their business over the next twelve months which are likely to be extremely stressed months?  

 
26:18 
Joel Harrison 
One of the kind of core opportunities or best ways of marketing demonstrating its success is to focus on existing customers at the moment, whether that's retention, renewal or upsell, that's a really pretty primary thing to be focused on. If you're spending vast chunks of your budget on new customers it's going to be very hard yards. That seems like a really obvious place to start.  

 
26:37 
Georgina Gilmore 
The other thing is of course is there are going to be the companies that just pull their marketing budgets, right? Ironically, it can be a great opportunity then for those other companies to beef up their marketing budgets and actually to drive market share. Because if other companies are taking the ball off their customer base then there is that opportunity. I think it's important as well to keep your brand really visible at times like this because at times of uncertainty people need that trust and assurance of the brand that they've either bought into or are considering buying into. Over invest and beef up brand activity and be that PR, social, whatever you're doing is really key. I think it's also a good time to sometimes take some risks at a time like this and be a bit innovative and creative. It's a time where change is happening, think a bit differently, look back and think about your strategy as well and your plans because the world has changed.  

 
27:38 
Georgina Gilmore 
You might need to kind of get those out of the drawer and take a look at them again and think about how things might need to be different. Different doesn't mean we're going to cut the budget by 40%. Different can be. Let's look at a different way of doing this.  

 
27:52 
Dom Hawes 
Okay. We like to finish off our episodes of unicorn these days with a quickfire pest. Georgie, thinking about B, two B generally, what worries you politically about the next twelve months?  

 
28:01 
Georgina Gilmore 
My fear is so many brands have done such a great job of expanding globally and reaching into markets that they never dreamed of years ago. My fear is people becoming polarized and becoming far more locally inward, looking into their own kind of countries and regions and not so accepting of global brands. I think global brands are going to have to work even harder to think about their local relevance as well as being global. I think Shane and I coined a phrase global, a mixture of global, obviously, and local, and brands need to think about that even harder now.  

 
28:39 
Dom Hawes 
Brilliant. I'm going to come to the S. What sociocultural trends, Joel, do you think are going to impact how we market, communicate, do business?  

 
28:47 
Joel Harrison 
I think that we're seeing gradual shift in the kind of the demographics that are involved in making marketing decisions or making buying decisions as well. Therefore there's this gradual inexorable shift towards new platforms, new channels. We're doing our first TikTok campaign, for example, which I've provided some visuals for, which I'm terrified to see how they can be added to it. I think that's coming out quite soon for Ignite USA. What we're also seeing in terms of we alluded to earlier on, is how buying decisions get made. Increasingly there's lots of evidence showing that the buyers are very much shunning advertising and kind of overt messages, and they're increasingly relying on trusted mechanisms and advocacy. What in the state of your cynical, you might call dark social. I think in a more positive, what we can call communities where people come together within a safe space to get opinions, to share perspectives, and kind of understand more deeply what's going on and how to make certain buying decisions.  

 
29:35 
Joel Harrison 
Certainly that's what proposition is built upon, the ability to do that, for marketers to do that and to build that network and understand what your peers think about things. For me, that's a really exciting development, and you're seeing it across multiple different sectors, not just in B to build or in marketing. It's really exciting development how the world of kind of commerce and buying is changing and decisions are made, and it is kind of closer back to that natural word of mouth thing. We just have a digital mechanism to do that. So that's exciting. It's a challenge then for brands to know how to respond to that and get on board with that.  

 
30:02 
Dom Hawes 
I'm going to take that as the answer for the T as well in the past. I'm going to say we've done that now, and I'm going to finish on a positive quick one for each of you. What do you think marketing's biggest opportunity is over the next twelve months?  

 
30:12 
Joel Harrison 
I think it's about, as we discussed, two things. First of all, about understanding business need and responding to that. This is a time of crisis. If marketing can get on board and understand what the C suite needs them to do, how they need to behave and communicate that in the right way, marketing is kind of stock will be higher in those organizations and those individuals will be more trusted and there'll better relationship going forward. Just added to that, I do also think I think Georgie is going to agree on this one, but I think ESG is a big one as well. There's a low level understanding about it. It's been a tick box thing. Oh yeah, got to do that. Actually it's not being understood or leverages a point of difference. I think it's going to become increasingly important for different ways, whether you got a product or whether you just need to respond to something.  

 
30:46 
Joel Harrison 
It's different for every company, different environments they work in. That's a really an opportunity and it's a great way of demonstrating marketing social value as well.  

 
30:54 
Georgina Gilmore 
Yeah, completely agree. I think it's that innovation and thinking differently as well. That's the positive opportunity for marketing in the next twelve months. Because it is time to if you are still down in the basement, hopefully you're not, or in the stationery cupboard, if you want to change the view of marketing, a time where perhaps things are a bit unstable, to come to the table with creativity and commercialism combined, it is a great opportunity to do that. You need to make sure that you speak business.  

 
31:27 
Dom Hawes 
That's the end of the podcast for today. I have to say, I think things are much clearer now. We've had a great conversation. It's all about perception, about optics. Although marketing has a responsibility to own how it is seen itself, luckily we as marketers are also best placed to fix that. Remember, at our heart we're communicators and storytellers. We define how the company is seen and who it's seen by. We hear time and time again that marketing isn't business focused enough. It's up to us to show the business that we are. It's up to us to show them what we have to offer. It's up to us to make the case for including us in mergers and acquisitions. I have to say, on a personal note, I absolutely staggered that most business or more businesses sorry, feel it's inappropriate to get their senior marketers involved at an earlier stage.  

 
32:19 
Dom Hawes 
It blows my mind. Anyway, to close out on what Georgie and Joel said at the end of our chat the next twelve months, look we think they're going to be hard. Maybe this is the time to take risks, to innovate. Maybe it's the time to look, to make really big gains and to guide our corporate ships over choppy waters. There's been a sea change in how marketing is viewed over the recent years, but it's nothing we can't navigate. In next week's episode of Unicorny, I'm joined by Russ Powell, MD. Of awesome award winning B two b marketing agency sharper b to B and Don Campbell, who is the head of alliance and partner marketing at Endava. And wow, what a guest. Don is a seasoned B to B marketer with years of experience is now building awesome alliances and partners to help super fast growth endava well win the future.  

 
33:12 
Dom Hawes 
Frankly, it's an amazing show where Don talks to us about some of the specifics, about making partnerships and using them to help drive market share. Please do tune in there. Thank you for listening today's show. Together, we're building a body of reference to make marketing work better for business. Now it takes us eight to 10 hours to produce each and every episode of Unicorny. Please take the time to share, rate and review us, help us get found and help yourself at the same time. Because Unicorny is far more than a podcast. It's a community of leading marketing minds. Pretty soon we're going to be running events too. If you're interested in joining our community, please get in touch by following the Unicorny page on LinkedIn or connecting to me on LinkedIn. My name is Dom Horse. H-A-W-E-S. You've been listening to Unicorny with me, dom Horse.  

 
34:04 
Dom Hawes 
Powered by Selby Anderson, the marketing group that helps complex businesses win the future. Unicorny is conceived and produced by Selby Anderson with creative support from One Fine Play. Nicola Fairley is the executive producer, connor Foley is the series producer, CASRA Farusia is the Superb audio engineer and editor, and the episode is recorded at Terminalstudios co UK. Thank you for listening and we will see you in the next one.