A handful of epiphanies.
Despite the suggestive title, this blog is not actually about a long-lost Pink Floyd album we've just unearthed. Though that would’ve been legendary …
Instead, today’s epiphanies are drawn from a talk Judd gave at a recent event hosted by KPMG Singapore’s Clients & Markets Group, a discussion of the important discoveries that have most shaped his thinking. There were eight such epiphanies in that evening’s talk, but that felt like a bit much for one post. So here come four – we’ll cover the other half down the road sometime.
1. It’s never too early to have “the marketing conversation.”
There are two kinds of company. In one, marketing is tacked on after a long process of customer insight and analysis and testing of everything from product and service development to pricing and distribution. In this company, marketing is how you sell whatever it is you make.
In the other, marketing is viewed as “how our company competes.” It’s not a department or a team or a skillset; it’s rightly seen as the responsibility of what my friend (and former Fortune 500 CMO) Stephen Ban calls “the top of the house.” In this company, marketing is how you make something the market wants to buy.
Which means “the marketing conversation” happens early and often and continuously. Because among all the conversations that are taking place, this one matters most.
This ultra-important epiphany also comes with its own corollary, because while it’s never too early for the marketing conversation, it can easily be too late. And when this happens, the only thing marketing can do is to make the best of the decisions that’ve already been made upstream. For better or worse. And it’s why – to paraphrase the late great Jerry Della Femina – nothing kills a bad product faster than good marketing.
2. What people think of your brand is arguably a lot less important than when they think of it.
Brand and business owners, and the marketing apparatus that supports them, spend a lot of time focused on brand image: what people think of the brand, or, more often, what the brand owner wishes people were thinking. This feels only natural, and it’s hard to blame those brand owners. Except their thinking turns out to be based on a set of flawed premises about how people actually interact with brands out in the world.
For example, people think less about brands than marketers believe (hope?) – a lot less. They think the brands in any particular category – car insurance, soft drinks, laptops, banks, jet fuel – are mostly alike. Far more alike than they are different, let alone unique. They do a lot less rational comparing of brands, even in so-called high-interest categories. And brands serve mostly as a mental shortcut – triggered by emotions, perhaps, but with a deeper emotional pull only for very few buyers.
All of which means that the “what” of brands – developing it, promoting it, measuring it – soaks up a disproportionate amount of business resource relative to its importance to the people who actually shop for these brands.
As Prof Byron Sharp has said, from a commercial perspective, the most important decision buyers make is whether to buy at all. Which means that when a buying situation arises, what matters is not so much that your brand be evaluated, seen as different, or remembered for containing 20% more of some key ingredient, but that it be remembered at all.
This is the concept of mental availability, or as I like to think of it, “brand awareness for the commercially savvy.” Not the artificial, research-y, 7% higher “for people like me” kind of awareness, but awareness when it counts. As I’ve written elsewhere, high brand awareness in a survey may make you proud, but high mental availability in the marketplace can make you rich.
But “when” thinking doesn’t end with mental availability, because once you start digging into the whole context around planning, purchase and usage of the brand you discover a gold mine of opportunities. By thinking more creatively than their competitors about these “when” questions, companies have been able to create not just clever marketing stunts but lasting commercial advantage.
Like Snickers has in shifting from a “what” focus based on being “packed with peanuts” to a “when” focus that’s all about rescuing you from being seen by your mates as weak and whiny when you need a snack. Some companies have even built entire business categories on “when”, as DeBeers did by inventing the “tradition” of the diamond engagement ring, for when you most need to impress the woman you love (along with her peers and family).
The evidence is clear. For consumers, most brands are good enough at what they do, and the “what” doesn’t vary much within a category. For brand owners, then, the choice should be equally clear. You need your brand to be memorable more than you need it to be meaningful. Creating memorability on the basis of “what” is hugely challenging and likely to be ineffective anyway. The real opportunity is to define and distinctively, memorably brand new occasions when buyers should think of you.
3. All business owners are grappling with the same basic questions.
Every industry has its own terms of art, metrics, benchmarks and rules of thumb. And business leaders in any one sector can be downright dismissive of the way other sectors operate. But while the language used may differ from company to company, leaders’ concerns, it turns out, do not. I’ve never done a stakeholder interview that didn’t kick off with one of these issues: Where are we now and how did we get here? Where do we want to be instead and what’s keeping us from getting there? How might we get there? Are we actually getting there?
Left unanswered, any one of these questions can cause a loss of sleep, any combination a loss of hair, and the whole set a loss of job. Which makes any one of them a winning conversation-starter. Of course, moving from conversation-starter to actual productive conversation requires being able to shepherd stakeholders past their easy early answers, to challenge their assumptions, and to insist on evidence-based answers to each question’s built-in follow-up – “And how do we know?”
That takes considerable skill. But the payoff is also considerable. Because these plain-language questions can be answered by every stakeholder – nobody ever lacks a point of view. Further, since each answer feeds the next question in the cycle, the exercise serves to stress-test its own logic as you go along.
I’ve worked for a lot of companies that flogged complex, “proprietary” approaches to getting stakeholders to reveal their concerns and assumptions. But I’ve never seen anything work as effectively as these deceptively simple questions. After all, when you’re trying to help a client develop potential solutions, the most valuable commodity is their stakeholders’ time – why would you waste a minute of it getting them to buy into the wonders of your system, when you can dive straight into the issues that are already on their minds, in a language they already know?
4. There's a secret weapon business owners can use against marketing fluff.
Speaking of plain-language questions, there’s another one worth exploring, because it gets at the core of what marketing needs to be doing in the first place.
Remember, a brand has one main job to do: help the business that owns it to grow. But as marketing has developed (I hesitate to say “matured”) and expanded and fragmented and digitalized and gotten insanely complex, its practitioners have indulged in all sorts of navel gazing, fluffy metric touting, cultural “impact” claiming and general shiny object chasing – all at the expense of commercial relevance.
Which means that business owners – not only but especially those who lack a foundational understanding of how marketing actually works – need a tool that can both filter out the inevitable BS and bring the marketing conversation back to commercial reality.
And as it happens, there’s a brutally simple question which does exactly that: “How is whatever you’re proposing going to make what we’re selling easier to buy?”
Note that little word “how” – these three letters make all the difference. Because it’s not enough to ask whether the marketing proposal will help; no self-respecting marketing person will ever answer “no, not really.”
Sure, getting at “how” is harder and takes more thought. Good answers will plausibly cover a wide range of marketing influences across the 4Ps (product, price, place, promotion). But again, the good news is that companies that train themselves on this exercise will start to find they’re wasting less resource on stuff that doesn’t really help them compete. And creating more impact from the stuff they’re now focused on instead.
And the best part is, you don’t have to be a marketing genius to improve your outcomes. You just have to understand that marketing works best when it focuses on doing one thing well: making the brand easier to buy.