0.4 How Marketing teams work
If you want to know why marketing that works, works, and why so much doesn’t here’s the answer: because it spends time on its ‘why’ and its ‘how’ rather than just on its ‘what’. It understands that success is inception aligned to the customer’s purchase process and the sales methodology, and because it operationalises delivery of that as one marketing organisation at scale. Not because it can come up with creative concepts or uses cool technology. Simply knowing what success looks like in your individual team is not the answer. It may be part of an answer and it may be progress from where you have been, but it’s not going to get you to where you need to go.
At their heart, great organisations and great leaders focus on two things: Why and How. ‘Why’ is your purpose, your vision, the value you create for customers. Put another way, Why is the first page of your strategy. But the second page, the page that makes the difference is ‘How’. How marketing that works, works. How prioritisation and operationalisation work. How data works. How to create ideas in your customer’s minds. How to remove waste from the process of doing so. As Bill Gates said, “The most brilliant strategy won’t lead to success unless it’s executed effectively.” Or perhaps Thomas Edison put it even better when he said “Strategy without execution is hallucination.”
To work the how is the build the strategy for execution. It is to invest the time, energy, brainpower and commitment to making how you execute so considered, intentional and effective that your strategy cannot fail. It is to not produce great ideas and average outputs. It is about consistently, repeatedly maximising your chances of being successful rather than leaving it up to chance or the heroic efforts of people to paper over the cracks. Would you rather pull a result out the hat at the eleventh hour every time, or would you rather build to excellence every time? Would you rather be a duck paddling furiously under the water while above the water things look serene, or would you rather be duck riding a jet ski while wearing sunglasses?
This is not a site about ‘what’ you need to do. If you’re a marketer, you hopefully know that. This is a site about reducing complexity to the simplest of axiomatic principles and then expanding to understand why and how and when and where this impacts how the marketing function works. It is about understanding the fundamentals – because as we’re going to see, the details you don’t think matter, really matter – and it is about how a marketing organisation is built from them.
Comedian and satirist Bill Hicks had some choice words on the value of marketers to the wider world. “There’s no rationalization for what you do and you are Satan’s little helpers. Seriously… You are the ruiner of all things good.” He had some more choice words too but I think you get the point. Hopefully his views are not shared too broadly but I expect that to Joe Public he’s not alone in not understanding what Marketers actually do. Surely marketing is impactful creative, memorable messaging and fun experiences? Marketing is an embodiment of creative expression. It is an expression of ideas. Right?
Anyone who’s worked in an enterprise marketing organisation in recent memory will likely have a very different interpretation. Yes, the output of marketing is typically something that has been developed through the lens of creative visuals, copywriting or brand experience. After all, at the discrete activity level marketing is inception aligned to the customer’s purchase process and Sales’ sales methodology. But modern marketing is also about data. A lot of data. And planning with data. And even more reporting on data.
The 8 How’s of an effective team
The four-part puzzle is the outcome leaders drive as they design out the inefficiency, inconsistency, overwork and churn that affect most teams and organisations. It allows them to operate an organisation that makes making good, shared decisions quickly, with clear responsibility and effective measurement. They’re the heart of how the marketing organisation moves away from Random Acts of Marketing to running as a value creation machine.
Any activity that has little useful connection to a bigger picture, strategic alignment to an organisation goal or functional association with a team that should own it regardless of whether it performs well, is a Random Act of Marketing. Whether it’s done with the best of intent or to subvert a rule, Random Acts of Marketing execution can unintentionally cause dysfunction or inefficiency. Always remember, there are two measures that matter: what value did you generate and how much did it cost you to do that. The more random acts of marketing that perpetuate your teams, the more unoptimized your resource will be.
Moreso, its impossible to make data-driven decisions when there’s no consistency of data and no one follow’s the decisions; its impossible to continually improve when no one agrees what needs improving because there’s not alignment on what’s being done; and its inefficient to automate anything that isn’t delivering the right value anyway. This is the undoing of the four-part puzzle. How you work is as much of a driver of value as what work you do, and failing to work the how means strategy is likely to remain at the stage of idealism and ideas. As Steve Jobs said: “To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.”
To achieve these four objectives, Marketing teams must work through answers to the eight 'Hows', which then inform how they daily plan, deliver and improve value. These Hows are all questions – questions that everyone across the marketing organisation needs to be able to state, interpret accurately for their role and act upon – and to 'work the how' is to bring the full weight of leadership to apply considered thought, analysis, governance and effective communication to answer each of them.
How do we prioritise?
How do we plan?
How do we make decisions?
How do we speak?
How do we work together?
How do we create value?
How do we innovate?
How do we win?
You can jump to explore these 8 How’s now, but this site is designed so you can also explore the fundamentals that affect them. Its essential to understand how they’re influenced by forces outside of marketing.