Brands not channels pt.2
Arguably I didn’t go far enough with my last post. That sometimes happens when the urge to hit publish becomes too great. The drawbridge gets pulled up on topics which could be looked at in much more detail.
The topic of fragmentation is perhaps one of the most interesting and fertile territories in our industry. Whilst my last post predominantly dealt with fragmentation of the media landscape, it’s probably worth saying that the marketing landscape as a whole is fragmenting too. Responsibility for the 4Ps (or the 5Ps, or 7Ps) is more diffuse than ever before, with more people in more roles in more departments contributing to the creation and delivery of a businesses brand and marketing strategy. Importantly, not all of these people and functions will report into the CMO, potentially sitting in different sections of an organisation with a ‘different route’ to C-Suite representation (such as Technology or Revenue/Sales).
So, for want of better phraseology. there is increased fragmentation on both the supply side and the demand side of the brand management process. Functionally, this presents a challenge because strategy, when executed properly, is incredibly singular and focussed; informing not only the choices a business should make but also the choices a business shouldn’t make, across brand, marketing, media and advertising.
The more sprawling the responsibility for marketing, the more likely it is for ‘channel-centric’ thinking to creep into the process at the expense of ‘consumer-centric’ or to refer back to the title of this post, ‘brand-centric’ thinking. Channel centric thinking being decisions or choices which make sense withing the context of a specific environment, but fail to acknowlegde the ‘nested’ way consumers interact with a brand or category.
Some of the challenges of ‘channel-centric’ thinking were highlighted in the previous post: budgets may be allocated by function or channel, rather than a single task (e.g my online budget is X, my ‘digital budget is Y and my retail budget is Z'). Fundamentally, this locks marketers into an output orientated approach (What do i get for my money?) rather than allowing them to opperate within the context of an outcome orientated approach (where do i best allocate my money to reach my objective?).
Challenges emerge elsewhere too. In a market where media is increasingly bought through auction models on self-serve platforms, an organisation can effectively inflate it’s costs by duplication of targeting (different parts of the business trying to reach the same consumer) in channels like social and search, unless systems are put in place to manage the way brands use channels such as Meta and Google.
I think that much of what we’re seeing points to the fact that the defining skill of high performing marketing organisations of the future won’t be some new discipline or function we’re yet to imagine, but instead will be something more fundamental.
Things like Portfolio Management.
Therefore, perhaps the the companies that will win in the future will be those that can:
Effectively allocate resource to the right parts of the portfolio at the right time - both in terms of people and physical resource, but also marketing spend - thinking in terms of outcomes, not outputs.
Understand how the different parts of the brand portfolio work together to create something greater than the sum of the parts - and have analytical procedures in place to quantify (looking back) and estimate (looking forward) how different parts of the business benefit one another
Put a consumer orientated media and data infrastructure at the heart of all marketing processes and outputs
Wrap all of the above in a ‘brand world’ that is consistent over time and coherent across space (which isn’t to say you need ‘matching luggage’ - but that the way touchpoints look and feel should be aligned to the role they play in the journey and that where applicable ‘expectation/experience’ gaps don’t emerge)
This is hard for many organisations to do though.
Hard because it requires investment into new skills and new infrastructure. Hard because it’s not that sexy, at least when compared to some of the newer and more shiny things which compete for time and attention.
And hard because it often requires change in working culture and the way people work with one another. And most people don’t like change.
