Better

Marketing.
Introduction

Better
get
better

Better Marketing. Copyright Brilliant Noise 2019

Congratulations on taking some time to step back and have a think about
things – about your industry, your role, your career and your company.

We need to make marketing better. We need to make better marketing.

These are things we might have been able to have as the theme for
a marketing conference at any time in the last 50 years. Who doesn’t
want better?

But it’s more than that right now, isn’t it? Better is a survival strategy for
businesses whose success relies on the power of their brand to grab
customers’ attention.

Which brands survive and which die will depend on which are able to
become better.

At Brilliant Noise we consider this knowing full well that we’re standing
on a burning platform. What’s burning? Your ability to reach customers
effectively. Why is the platform burning? Because too many brands and
their agencies are failing to reinvent marketing.
Organisations are trying to reach customers, or claim to have customer-
obsession programmes. Yet the majority of senior marketers don’t have
clear customer personas, don’t understand their customers’ journeys
and don’t have the in-house capability to plan their marketing around
customer behaviour.

We need to build a new platform, but instead brands are dousing the
timbers with water as quickly as they can, fire-proofing the executive
quarters, and screening off the areas that have already collapsed into
the sea. We need to build a better platform and cross over to it before
it’s too late.

Let’s get real and ask; are we patching up the old model, or working on
building a new one? Are we making do, or making marketing better?

Better Marketing is so close to our own focus at Brilliant Noise. Our

belief in making marketing better is so strong we’ve spelled it out in a
two-metre square illuminated sign in our reception. It’s the first thing we
see when we come in; and an ever-present reminder of our mission.

Better Marketing.
This monograph lays out the urgent case for making marketing better.
It shares insights we’ve gained over the last decade from working with
brands looking to reinvent what they do well. It talks about who will win
and lose in this period of change, and offers some first steps to starting
or reinvigorating the process of transformation in your organisation.

Yours,
Antony Mayfield,
CEO, Brilliant Noise
Brighton, UK, March 2019

Brilliant Noise
6 Better Marketing.
Verbs beat nouns: Building better marketing

There is a personal training studio that markets itself as providing a

12 WEEK TRANSFORMATION. Posters adorn nearby billboards of
before-and-after customers who have gone from normal looking to
terrifyingly buff, or a bit overweight to noticeably less overweight.
I’ve been going there more than 12 months and while I am much fitter,
and pleased with the service, I have not undergone a dramatic physical
change. Few do, apparently. The joke in the changing room among long-
term patrons is “well they never said which 12 weeks it would happen in”.

One of the problems with the term marketing transformation – or indeed

transformation – is the implied sense of a destination. There is a from-
and-to promise in there – admittedly less brazen than the borderline
misleading photos at the fitness studio – and it is a lie.

It would be better to talk in terms of marketing transforming; as in, “we

are now a successfully transforming” organisation. But that phrase is
ugly and requires too much secondary explanation. Luckily there is
a more useful description of what we need to build a better model of
marketing – the flywheel.

1 In layman’s terms, I would like to be thinner.

Where’s your flywheel?

The flywheel metaphor was created by Jim Collins in his business

classic Good to Great2. It was famously adopted by Amazon. This
model is about sequential phases of work which logically support
the next. The more you do them, the better you get and the more
momentum the flywheel develops.

In his award-winning book about Amazon, The Everything Store,

Brad Stone described the Amazon flywheel:

Drawing on Collins’s concept of a flywheel, or self-reinforcing

loop, Bezos and his lieutenants sketched their own virtuous cycle,
which they believed powered their business. It went something
like this: Lower prices led to more customer visits. More
customers increased the volume of sales and attracted more
commission-paying third-party sellers to the site. That allowed
Amazon to get more out of fixed costs like the fulfillment centers
and the servers needed to run the website. This greater efficiency
then enabled it to lower prices further. Feed any part of this
flywheel, they reasoned, and it should accelerate the loop.4

Better Marketing.
Jeff Bezos and his team saw the flywheel as their secret sauce, an
incredibly powerful framework for developing the business. It wasn’t a
destination or a desired state. It was transforming, not a transformation.

“Make Marketing Better, Make Better Marketing” isn’t only the

strapline for Brilliant Noise. It is our mission, and, by developing
a hybrid consultancy and agency services offering, our business
model. We teach and create better marketing. We refer to it as
the flywheel, but not just our flywheel. We want want to bring it
to life for all of our clients as well as ourselves.

Making marketing better is about developing the capabilities and

operational effectiveness of marketing organisations. Whether that’s
developing better use of data throughout a planning process, creating
an in-house content production function, or developing a customer-
focused mindset for its leaders. The best way to learn and to improve
these processes and capabilities is to exercise them. Making better
marketing is about creating data-led, customer-first marketing
programmes. By working alongside client teams, or supporting and
evaluating existing teams, we learn what works better and what doesn’t.

2 Jim Collins, Good to Great (2001)

What could better marketing look like?

Better will mean something different to every brand.

There are common threads and basic principles that apply to everyone –
first among them, the integration of data and creative. While many
agencies and in-house teams have tried to bring in data, it has been
more of a bolt on, rather than an integration. Creatives have baulked
at being dictated to by data. Generalist marketers have too often been
insufficiently data-literate to see where it should fit in the process.

In-house your capability not your agencies

In-housing is a trendy answer to the need for data-led creative, but it’s a
temporary fix.

Recently, Unilever claimed it had saved €500 million by bringing content

production in-house and Vodafone say ‘in-house media buying is
overwhelmingly good’3.

One Forrester analyst told us recently that some brands were benefiting
from “de-coupling” the creative or content production process. Large
production specialists or central clearing houses are able to produce
bulk content and localise it far more effectively than agency networks.

Better Marketing.
Others have fired their creative agencies altogether and found
themselves with large war-chests of budget to invest in test-and-learn,
data-led development of new processes.

But; as discussed in a recent panel session at the Content Marketing

Association, bringing an external agency “in-house” is only necessary
because brand teams and traditional agencies don’t have the relevant
skills for data-led, customer-focused marketing.

A recent study by McKinsey of global CMOs shows the evidence for true
integration of data with creative:

…marketers who are what we call “integrators”—those who

have united data and creativity—grow their revenues at twice
the average rate of S&P 500 companies: at least 10 percent
annually versus -3 percent.

CMOs say the skills gaps is a major challenge in their teams. But far
too little is being done to actually build marketing capability. Marketers
should be able to understand their customers but only 33.6% rate their
organisation’s data skills above average4.

3
https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/vodafone-says-in-housing-digital-media-buying-
overwhelmingly-good/1579022
4
https://www.marketingweek.com/2018/07/31/future-marketing-organisation-filling-data-skills-gap/
Yet few brands are really building a data-led creative agency in-house.
The predominant version is an external agency working in-house within
a brand. It’s fashionable and faster but doesn’t nourish a team to be fit
for the future.

An organisation can’t claim to be customer-obsessed if it doesn’t

understand its customers or how to market to current and new ones.
But there’s a long way to go to transform the data-led creative marketing
capabilities of in-house employee teams. The healthy solution is to
address the capability skills-gap and focus on the reinvention of mindset
and ways of working within teams. At Brilliant Noise, we believe that
capability is the sum of people and processes – both need to be reinvented.

Networked not siloed

Although content is not a new trend in marketing it’s useful in breaking
away from old models of working. Content sits outside of the media-
creative agency mode of working, relying more on editorial techniques
and earned attention than paid-media-first ways of working. It is often an
area where brands create new silo-busting, innovative operating models.

As Brilliant Noise SEO expert, Phoebe Yates, told a seminar recently:

“One of our agency roles is connecting content people across

the business. Often when we get people together to collaborate
on a common issue like search or data, it is the first time all
these content professionals have sat in the same room.”

Better Marketing.
Content and creative marketing talent in organisations often serve the
same customer. If they barely know each other and have never worked
together, it doesn’t take an expert marketing consultant to predict there
will be a great deal of inefficiency, and as a result customers are not
likely to be served well.

More speed, less waste

What differentiates marketing organisations that are displacing older
ways of working? Speed. Removing siloes speeds up the cycle of
getting great creative produced, distributed and the results analysed to
elicit insights.

We saw this effect in our work with American Express. Creating new,
global ways of working on content meant cross-functional teams had
to form to collaborate on research, strategy, editorial calendars and
measurement. Once they did, the speed of content production and
executing campaigns increased dramatically – costs fell as delays and
bureaucracy disappeared and customer engagement skyrocketed.

There are warnings from the work of Jim Collins we would do well to
bear in mind. Some of the “great” companies in Good to Great have
diminished or disappeared in the years since the book was published. In
his recent monograph, he explains:

…we found that the demise of once-great companies happens in

five stages: (1) Hubris Born of Success, (2) Undisciplined

Brilliant Noise
14 Better Marketing.
How great brands die
There are warnings from the work of Jim Collins we would do well to
bear in mind. Some of the “great” companies in Good to Great have
diminished or disappeared in the years since the book was published.
In his recent monograph, he explains:

1. Hubris Born of Success

2. Pursuit of More
3. Denial of Risk and Peril
4. Grasping for Salvation
5. Capitulation to Irrelevance or Death
- Take special note of Stage 4, Grasping for Salvation.5

What “grasping for salvation” in marketing looks like is putting big bets
on things that used to work, or the latest fad. Better to switch into a
flywheel mode and discover better ways of working and redesigning the
shapes of teams to reach customers more effectively.

5
Jim Collins, Turning the Flywheel (2019)

Brilliant Noise 15
Losers

When there is a 50:50 chance of transformation efforts failing, how

do you give your marketing capability programme the best chance
of success? A good start is to be aware of where others have failed.
The following are things we have seen slow or end efforts to change
marketing at major brands:

1. CX window-dressing.
It’s easy for leaders to proclaim grand ambitions to “put the
customer at the heart of their business” without following
through on the hard work of redesigning their ways of working.
When teams realise the vision is hollow they lose motivation.

2. Quarterly jitters.
Real capability change can be a two year project. But if sales
look shaky and the pressure is on, it takes real will power from
leaders not to pull back resources from capability development
and plough it into the diminishing but historically certain returns

Better Marketing.
 of old-school marketing tactics.
3. Organisational immune response.
Organisations reject change. Without the right conditions to
change behaviours, laudable goals and visions will flounder on
cynicism and self-interest.

4. Tech solutionism.
Where technically-minded stakeholders have the upper-hand
in developing digital capability hopes, budgets and resources
are ploughed into tech platforms. It usually takes a year or two
to realise no one is using the shiny new system. Our friends
at the leading marketing technology vendors say 90% of their
functionality is wasted because marketers don’t change their
ways of working to make the most of it.

5. L&D ghettoised.
Because capability is mis-read as skills and therefore training,
it’s delegated to learning and development teams who, lack the
budgets and power to get process re-design and culture change
underway, no matter how ambitious and well devised their
solutions may be.

Brilliant Noise
Nine things we’ve learned about making marketing better

Every organisation’s capability needs are unique. However, we’ve

learned nine lessons that seem to apply to almost every global brand
we’ve worked with.

1. Actually obsess about the customer.

Create clear, visual customer personas and customer journey
maps. Get them on the walls to get the customer into the heart
of every brief and planning conversation.

2. Find the bright spots.

Identify and celebrate the success that’s already there.
Capability building can be about scaling and making habits out
of things that already work.

3. Secure commitment from leaders.

Capability building is implicitly a transformation programme –
it will succeed if leadership makes it a priority and keep it a
priority. Encourage leaders to be role models for change in
order to continually drive momentum.

Better Marketing.
 4. Create the big story for the brand.
Put the brand’s core beliefs centre stage in a way everyone
understands and can tell and re-tell. It has to be true and it has
to be inspirational, because people need to commit to it with
confidence and pride.

“I think that is perhaps the No. 1 thing that leaders have to do:
to bolster the confidence of the people you’re leading.”
— Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft

5. Make and measure the hard business case.

There are numbers people and stories people. Numbers people
are the ones who kill projects that don’t make sense in terms of
numbers. Set out with the intention to create unignorable wins – big,
unambiguous numbers that say “this new way works”. Best to get
these wins in early to protect progress and reinforce the decision of its
leadership sponsors to back it.

Brilliant Noise
 6. Create instances of change.
The first challenge is to create momentum and belief in the
capability approach. This can be through pilots, or small
projects that show the power of new ways of working and
thinking. Pilot with pride – picking small but visible fights you
can win and inspire others with.

7. Develop your people’s customer-focused mindset.

The most important thing people can develop is an attitude and
approach to problem-solving that works in the digital age. Carol
Dweck of London Business School developed the concept of
“growth mindset”, showing that people who believed they could
learn and change were more successful than those with a “fixed
mindset”. Beyond developing the capacity to learn, there are
approaches to work and key concepts that will help us make
things better.

Better Marketing.
 8. Build change communities.
Many transformation and capability building programmes focus
on a big learning event or a solitary exercise, clicking through an
online learning platform. Connecting people for the longer term
can provide support as they disperse back to the departments
and territories. These networks also help erode silos and
encourage the use of cross-functional teams.

9. Keep telling stories of change.

Bright spots aren’t just a tactic for the beginning of capability
programmes. Build the habit of finding and telling inspiring
stories of change. There’s not a metric for it, but instinct tells
us that stories are better than intranets for sharing knowledge.
Stories have been around as long as humans have – the urge to
tell and hear a good story is about as hard-wired a human need
as eating and sleeping.

Brilliant Noise
And there we have it.

If we were to give the Too Long, Didn’t Read of this:

1. Consumers are turning away from brands’ attempts to reach them.

2. These changes will be brutal on brands that adapt slowly.
3. To survive, your brand will need to create a flywheel of better
campaigns and capability building.

We’d love to debate these ideas with you. A slide version and ebook
copies of this monograph are available for you to share with colleagues.
Just email our CCO, Maddy Cooper at maddy.cooper@brilliantnoise.
com and we’ll get them to you.

Thank you for reading.

Better Marketing. Copyright Brilliant Noise 2019

 We are one partner. Strategic, operational and creative in equal
measure. Combining marketing consultancy and creative agency to
make marketing more efficient.

We make marketing better

We make marketing better through improving efficiency: creating
customer-first teams, building digital capability, breaking silos and
reducing budget waste.

We make better marketing

We make better marketing by improving effectiveness: using customer
personas to earn attention by inspiring customers in the right place, at
the right time, with the right message.

www.brilliantnoise.com