Impact

The next time you stand on a beach, take a moment to look at the waves. Waves wash up and down a beach leaving hardly a trace of their presence behind them. Water bounces off rocks, rushes past pebbles and leaves even grains of sand visibly untouched. Marketing can similarly lap against a shore leaving minimal individual impact. We can say with certainty that the beach looks pretty much the same before and after a wave, but marketers still search for deeper understanding within those grains of sand anyway. Look hard enough and you’ll convince yourself of anything.

What’s significant about waves on a beach, though, is that over time those waves will shape the coastline. Unimaginable power lies within the ocean. And exactly like the waves in the sea, when marketing is channelled correctly, it has the power to carve canyons through mountains and bend the land to its will. The story of our planet is of one shaped by water and the story of great organisations is one shaped by marketing.

Recognising this, many marketing functions try to apply attribution measures across their marketing activity to take this into account. Pipeline or opportunities from an activity is spread across all other marketing activities that may have influenced its creation. Significant data science is required to do this effectively, analysing a variety of potential impacts that could be derived and baselining marketing activities against each other on their effectiveness driving these outcomes.

The ultimate goals of this exercise should be to understand what is or isn’t driving impact and to optimise the activity mix, but even then we still need to acknowledge that marketing activities must work together with each other. Measurement frameworks that look to spread impact across activities fail to understand that to be effective, marketing activities must work together. Brand does not work in isolation of demand. Digital does not work in isolation of events.

There is an endemic failure within marketing to understand what is really happening. Marketing teams misjudge the value of their work, misrepresent their impact and thus misalign their resources. Marketing leaders think in terms of their domain: what impact did I drive? They buy wins for their domain with their budgets and headcount without understanding how they really fit into a wider value chain for customers.

For most marketing organisations, it would be near impossible to determine the cost without firing entire teams and watching what happens. Of course, there would be lost capability, reduced output and other impacts over time, but if the rest of the organisation continued and evolved around the change then actually measuring the true cost of the loss would be unachievable.

This is not the same for sales; each sales person is typically underpinned by a calculation. This calculation looks at the value of the solutions they could sell, the quantity of those solutions against the market opportunity and the average win rate, and the cost of the sales person. When paired with a sales target, those numbers define how many sales people you need to hire or fire and how your end of quarter target is going to be hit.

How Marketing works as one team is as important as each team delivering functional excellence. Marketing that runs in isolation will almost always fail to meet its true potential. It will be like a wave kissing a beach. When Marketing operates at scale as one connected function it can drive meaningful impact. It can literally move mountains. Yet for many marketing functions this unity of purpose and focus of intent are not standard operating practice. Activities are planned, measured, budgeted for and lauded individually. Careers are built upon ‘my team drove this’ and this reasoning is accepted as sensible and accurate. Teams may agree on the ‘why’ and understand the ‘what’, but when they fail to invest in building the ‘how’ they dilute the impact and diminish their effectiveness.   Though they deliver results, they’re never quite what they could have been.