0.0 Why How matters
What do all great marketing teams have in common? Why do some organisations seem to continue delivering great, impactful, memorable marketing time after time rather than having the occasional big win followed by a slump into nothingness? And how do they seem to continuously, confidently understand what value they are creating, how they are creating it, and how it can be improved.
Pick up most books on marketing or marketing strategy and its amazing how quickly they get to telling you what to do. Buy contact lists. Build a social campaign. Run an event. Buy advertising. Unless you’re hiring an entirely new and extremely junior team or your hiring policies have been off for years, though, ‘doing stuff’ is most likely not your problem. Instead, for most enterprise marketing functions their biggest problems are that they do too much stuff, the stuff they do doesn’t stand out from the crowd and they don’t know if the stuff they do as the intended impact.
As a senior marketer stepping into a new leadership function the clock will be ticking for you to show meaningful impact and you have some decision points. Short term or long term impact? Tactical wins or strategic change? Temporary improvements or sustained excellence? Most likely you’ll want both – a small number of quick wins and a demonstrable evolution towards the big long-term transformation. And this means looking beyond ‘stuff’ of marketing to the strategy and operations of the team.
But as all successful people know, strategy without execution is wishing before disappointment. By design or by behaviour, great teams all prioritise the same four ways of working. Like a jigsaw, the puzzle is only complete when all four are present and operational, and together they are the basis for how teams think and do great marketing.
Collaborative clarity of purpose. They have a clear long-term vision that everyone can share and they use cross-functional teams to work together to develop responses to data-driven needs.
Data-driven decision making. They collect and share data freely and use it to drive collective understanding of business problems, potential solutions and process efficiency to deliver them.
Continuous evaluation and iterative improvement. They use continuous delivery to create value faster and accept calculated risks to evaluate effectiveness earlier.
Automation. They continually invest in automation to remove lower value, error-prone work from the process and increase team productivity and satisfaction.
The sum of successfully executing on the four-part puzzle is an operating model for the Marketing function. An intentional, consistent, effective way that the Marketing team delivers marketing and creates business value. The four-part puzzle is the antithesis of the stuff-first mindset and reflects the true priorities that new leaders are brought in to solve for. The role of senior leaders is to build the vision, strategy and engine, not to oversee the production of individual components, and yet many marketers.
In A Brief History of Time Stephen Hawking remarked “Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales. I therefore resolved not to have any equations at all.” Hawking eventually added one: the ubiquitous E=mc2. Given the foundational importance to science, our world and even popular culture of this equation I think he can be forgiven.
Talking about an ‘operating model for marketing’ may be a similar sin but one whose importance cannot be understated. How the marketing team operates determines how effectively the people within it are able to apply their skills, how integrated they can make their collective efforts, how efficiently that can be executed and how usefully the results can be measured. No equations were formed or harmed in the writing of these words, and you’ll be pleased to hear that none feature in further pages.
The purpose of this site, of the stories and examples shared and of the models included is to bridge the gap between marketing strategy and marketing tactics. This site is a complement to strategy and a counterpart to tactics.
Because how you work, has more influence on how you perform than anyone gives credit.