0.2 The purpose of Marketing

Sales and Marketing are inseparable, and yet very often they are separated. Sales and Marketing teams are like siblings – they need each other, but they may not choose each other as friends and they sometimes argue. Sometimes they argue a lot. Depending upon the team you sit in, your view may be that Sales is a Marketing completion function or Marketing is Sales without real targets. Neither of these views is useful. Marketing and Sales close deals together. Enterprise organisations that ‘don’t have Marketing teams’ still do marketing, they just call them by a different name and have slightly different remits.

There is a better way of thinking about this partnership – more of a ‘build from first principles’ way of thinking about it than jumping straight to the answer. In a world where sales’ resources are not limited by budget, what would a business leader do? They’d hire every sales person they could, align them against every target account and they’d have them work one-to-one relationships across the entire customer journey. They’d build connections with every contact, they’d bespoke every piece of communication and they’d align their product and solutions offers to be entirely custom. It would be like having world-leading account-based marketing campaigns for every possible prospect.

Of course, this can’t happen. Its grossly inefficient and terribly costly, to name but a few of the impracticalities. Sales teams do not have unlimited resources, and so they need to be efficient with how they apply them. And technique they use to achieve that? It’s called Marketing. Marketing is a Sales efficiency engine. Marketers build a brand to create desire and mental availability for a purchase; they support customer research into their own needs and their future potential; they position products and solutions against the market, competitors and industry trends; they engage customers (both existing and prospective to create connections for Sales teams to pursue; they craft compelling experiences to engage with; and they support customers achieving value after purchase. Put another way, Marketing throws the ball for Sales to smash it out the park.

Marketing is a Brand and Sales efficiency engine. This is important to understand. Marketing’s purpose, value, raison d'être is to create efficiency. But in an environment where efficiency is hard to benchmark, other measures can come to dominate. Vanity metrics, volume metrics, vague measures of impact and subjective ideas of value that on paper may look good and might well correspond to the loosely laid out and approved up-front objectives. But that in reality don’t really scale business impact of the overall Marketing organisation.

Marketing needs to be out ahead of Sales building brand, creating markets, defining position and creating opportunities and working alongside Sales to accelerate and close them at scale. If Marketing teams cannot see how they are driving organisational efficiency for Sales, they should question their long-term value.

Brand guidelines are an efficient way of creating emotional connections through consistency and repetition as much as solution messaging standardises how organisations speak to the market. Marketing’s job is not to duplicate, replicate or supplicate to Sales. The job of Marketing teams is to scale for success in partnership with Sales. But the execution of marketing can be held back in many other ways.

In the simplest possible terms all marketing activity must achieve two goals: capture attention and drive action. To not capture attention is to not drive action. To drive action is to make any audience think, feel or act in a desired manner. Without both of these attributes, any marketing activity will flounder or fail.

Creating action

Try to convince a young child to do something and their immature emotional control may push back. I have this pleasure with a two year old daily at the moment. Try to convince a seasoned executive and they may instead ask you to create a compelling business case. Hopefully.

Convincing another person to do something that they don’t want to do is very difficult. Convincing dogs can be difficult too and cats are impossible. But at least for humans there is usually a mixture of logic and emotion that go into any decision making with fundamentals that can be tapped into. Logic is the application of fact, reason and data, while emotion is motivated by softer factors such as ‘do I like it’, ‘do I think those facts align to what I believe’ and ‘how does this decision make me feel’.

Emotions can influence perception of facts, creating perspectives like ‘well they would say that, wouldn’t they’ and ‘but that’s not as relevant to me because my situation is different’. Factual decision-making may appear to be an unemotive process, but emotions distort reasoning in ways that sometimes have greater impact than can be anticipated. Arguing with a child is a very apt example of this. To the adult the chain of reasoning may be very sound and clear, but to the child the immediate urge of ‘but I want to do a different thing’ overwhelms and deafens their ability to listen. Much to that adults consternation and frustration.

“What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient... highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it's almost impossible to eradicate. An idea that is fully formed - fully understood - that sticks; right in there somewhere.” If you recognised that quote it’s because it is from Christopher Nolan’s 2010 film Inception. In the story, dreams can be invaded and information stolen as part of a new form of corporate espionage. In the dream space, people are less guarded about information and their true feelings, meaning theft of ideas can bring big rewards. The opposite though – implanting ideas in the target’s mind – is also possible but, conveniently for the plot, both very difficult and makes for a fantastic visual experience.

Simply telling someone to think something may cause them to reject it. They know the source of the idea was external. It is not ‘their idea’ and they can recognise its external source.

There’s a truth in this. If I tell you ‘download this ebook’ – a sadly not uncommon ask for marketers – then it is clear, direct and to the point, but it doesn’t necessarily make you want to do it. You know that it is me telling you to download it. If you know me and like me you might download it, but if you don’t, why would you? I could instead say ‘this is a really good ebook’ and if you know me and like me you’re probably just as likely – maybe more – to download it, even though I didn’t instruct you to. The idea to download doesn’t come from me, it comes from you. If instead I said ‘this ebook was downloaded over 20,000 times this month’ it once again doesn’t directly instruct you, but it may cause you to think you should download it too or risk missing out.

Inception misses one important point, as demonstrated above: you don’t have to be dreaming to implant ideas. Good communication, in fact, is the process of implanting ideas into a person's subconscious. People will always choose to act for one of only two reasons: because they want to or because they’re made to.

Clever communication is making people think the idea was theirs in the first place. The seed of a simple thought can germinate into action, because while the kernel of it may have been implanted externally, the development and actions come from mind of the audience. Inception is the hidden secret power of the communications world. It is the key to making people want to do something. Inception sits between making people do something and letting them decide for themselves.

Why does marketing that works, work? Because great marketing generates systematic inception in the mind of the target. Somewhere deep down, it creates the spark of an idea: I need to do that. It makes people, think, feel or do something. And those ideas stick, are reinforced and grow. Systemic inception is nurtured through multiple touchpoints and engagements to move a customer through to purchase. And it is supported by the path of least resistance for a customer to move along.

Through all the ages of marketing from when a big, bold brand TV campaign was the newest idea on the block to a modern multi-channel, integrated digitally-led media format bonanza, the definition of great marketing has remained the same: communications that produce inception in the minds of the target audience aligned to a desired action. Good discrete marketing produces clicks and visits but it doesn’t produce long-term impact. A great marketing organisation, however, operationalises inception.

To maximise the impact of the marketing organisation is to maximise the effectiveness of the inception. Most marketing activity fails to live up to expectations because its planned in a vacuum, executed in isolation and measured without regard for the way audiences really experience a brand. Personal, team or functional priorities overtake the integrated end goal that the whole marketing function should work towards.

Marketing teams can communicate with a customer ad infinitum, but unless the communication drives the desired mindset change it will remain only as communications from a Marketing team; it will not create business value. And though activity measurements may look effective, outcomes will not be achieved.