… as simple as AAA…
I think it’s time for marketing to get reorganized into something that’s effective in delivering real business results and integrated into the business operations. For too long, marketing has been ‘cosmetic’, superfluous, and a topical ointment. It’s time to dig back in and get rooted in the business operations.
How did marketing end up as a surface-type root configuration versus an oak’s, spreading out along the surface rather than down into the depths? Lots of reasons, not the least of which has been the overreliance on ‘broadcast’. I’ll save the post mortem for another time.
Where marketing is today is a separation of the key components, as illustrated by these simple three rings.
The company’s Architecture resides in one area, the marketing Activation in another, and the business Accountability in another. This division of strategy and execution has occurred over a fairly long period of time, and is more like entropy than an articulated redesign of how marketing should function. It’s just ‘drift’.
Within the Architecture circle, I include positioning, benefits, promise, insights, segmentation, IP, proposition, vision, mission, mandate, charter, values, personality, pyramid, pillars, equity(ies), audience, tagline, elevator story, value proposition, style guide, SWOT, model, and all of the other more ‘strategic’ structural work.
Within the Activation circle, I include all of the hands-on marketing work such as customer service, affinity, loyalty, funnel, trips, shopping basket, in-store, local, push/pull, promotion, PR, events, direct, spend optimization, buying rate and penetration, reach, behavioral cues etc.
And within the Accountability circle, I include scorecards, metrics, ROI, ROMI, shares, growth rate, and improvement measures.
When these three A’s are operating autonomously, what you end up with is disalignment, local optimization, and lack of integration. In how many companies are the four P’s of marketing (price, place, promotion, product) in one place? Less than 20%.
Shocking? Hardly. Look at all of the modified-name marketing departments: trade marketing, marketing services, media and marketing, marketing insights, co-marketing, shopper marketing, retail marketing, direct marketing, digital marketing, trend marketing, brand marketing, consumer marketing, store marketing, local marketing… really, how many marketing functions are in your organization (including sales support, data analytics etc.) and how well do they work together?
Look at how resources are allocated across the three A’s – how many people and dollars are in each circle? You can draw your own company’s circles based on the amount of resources in each – I have seen circles of all sizes – big Architecture and no Accountability, big Activation and no Architecture or Accountability, big Accountability and small Architecture and Activation. Again, how are these decisions being made? Is your resource allocation methodology based on year-ago, competing internal interests, the dynamics of the marketplace, shifting patterns of your target audience, shifting patterns of your competition, increasing or decreasing IP in your company, or other factors?
Let’s now assume we can connect the three A’s a little bit in your organization. What happens when Architecture is linked to Activation which is linked to Accountability? Still separate work functions, but now connected? (see the simplified illustration below)
And, finally, let’s assume the three A’s are interconnected, as in the little illustration below. What happens in that type of marketing function?
…
.
So, how do you get from the three disparate A’s to connected A’s to interconnected A’s?