Big Idea 2014: Marketing Becomes the Giving Tree for the C-Suite

December 17, 2013 

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"Marketing is everything." I hear that phrase - or a variation of it - a lot these days. I agree with the sentiment given how brands can turn almost any moment with a customer into an interactive experience. However, while it’s easy to say “marketing is everything,” the truth is that marketing can’t do everything. That’s why I think 2014 will be the year that marketing leaders must become givers: providers of insight, creators of connections, deliverers of performance improvement. Succeeding in this kind of giving will be critical if marketing is to drive above-market growth.

Let me explain. As companies become ever more responsive to and informed by their customers, their range of interactions will continue to expand. Those customer interactions hit many different parts of the organization (call center, sales staff, web sites, mobile apps, etc.). Since those interaction points are often owned by many different parts of the organization, the customer experience is often disjointed, inconsistent, and unfulfilling. Those experiences need to be integrated into consistent customer journeys. That’s where marketing comes in.

Here are three areas where marketing can really make a difference:

Provide relevant insights: Big Data and analytics have opened the door to mind-blowing insights about customers – how they behave, what they like/don’t like, what they’re interested in, etc. While carefully staying within the bounds of privacy parameters, marketers can know so much more about their customers than was possible even two years ago. Marketers need to identify, bundle, and serve relevant insights to the various parts of the organization. Insights are the foundation of any commercial strategy. Those insights, in fact, provide a vocabulary that the organization can share across silos. Data – and the insights derived from them – become the lingua franca of the organization.

Create valuable connections: CMO's know their effectiveness will increasingly lie in a brand's ability to make the execution happen at the front-lines of interaction with a customer. But marketing cannot control them all. What that means is that marketing will need to tighten their partnerships with sales, service, and product development around all sorts of things, such as how the brand should handle personalization and privacy. Service organizations, usually under the COO, now need to also coordinate with marketing as the volume of requests coming in through social media blurs the lines between what is remediation help and selling support. CMOs will need to increasingly guide IT on what their priorities should be for investing in new technologies that drive personalization and new experiences. Marketers are helping CFO's understand that "working media spend" ratios no longer define the efficiency of marketing operations when more investment has to go into content for owned and earned media.

Deliver performance excellence: Beyond creating tighter relationships, CMOs and marketing in general will need to help various other parts of the organization connect with each other. Product design should be working closely with sales. Marketing can be the glue to help bind these groups together around a vision based on deep customer insights and a clear go-to-market strategy. That growth comes from having balanced and connected marketing and sales capabilities. We have found that companies with that profile perform 2x to 3x better than the market in terms of revenue growth. And while only 14 percent of companies in a separate survey believe they have the right investment levels across their capabilities, almost 2/3 of that group has much greater confidence in their ability to beat the market compared to those that aren’t investing effectively. When the organization can effectively work together better, marketing becomes a “performance multiplier” for the entire business.

These are all fundamental acts of giving. But unlike ending of “The Giving Tree” (a great book, by the way, as any parent knows) where the tree wilts away after giving away so much, the marketing version will enhance marketing’s influence. If marketing can really deliver on insights, design great experiences by pulling together the right parts of the organization, and then deliver those services and products at the right place and time to the right person, then marketing will see its influence increase significantly. I’ve seen it happen at a number of clients already. In 2014, I expect to see that giving role for marketing expand.

Learn more on our McKinsey on Marketing & Sales site, and please follow us on Twitter@McK_MktgSales. And please follow me @davidedelman.

Graphic: Cienpies Design / shutterstock

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Wanted: PR Pro With Mad Social Media Skillz

by Alison Hill, Yesterday, 1:00 PM

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Before I started my own PR company, in the days when I still had to perfect my resume, buy the perfect interview suit, and meet a public relations executive for an interview in an office with fluorescent lighting (shudder), there were certain things I knew to be true:

1. My resume—no matter how much experience I had—must fit onto one page.

2. I’d need at least three good references—and if one of those references was from a reporter, I was golden.

3. In an interview, I’d talk about my outstanding skills at working my Rolodex in order to get reporters on the telephone so I could get my clients ink. Literal ink. Like in print newspapers and newsstand magazines.

4. If I got the job, I could expect to be working at least 40 hours a week, mostly in that office with the fluorescent lighting, punctuated with buying lunches for journalists (when they’d let me) and working the red carpet or the press room at nighttime events.

Some of those things are still true—there will always be publicists staffing red-carpet events as long as there are celebrities and media—but most everything else about the process of getting and keeping a PR job has changed. (Just try to get a reporter on the phone these days!)

While this isn’t a surprise, I got a look at the nitty-gritty realities recently when I interviewed Jim Delulio, whom I worked with years ago when he was an EVP at PainePR. Today, Jim is president and founder of PR Talent, a national executive recruiting firm specializing in freelance and full-time public relations positions.

Jim has witnessed ongoing evolution in the PR business for years, and serves as a guide to the new landscape for PR professionals. Among the changes Jim described:

The skills: “I see the entire skill-set composition changing for what has been called a PR professional,” Jim says. “In the next five years, a PR person will spend 60% of their time on social media activities, 20% on traditional media, and the rest on client relations and team management.” So much for my Rolodex and landline!

In fact, Jim adds, “Social media and growth in digital are really the big demand drivers for new jobs right now. There are jobs available at all levels, from newbie to senior management, but the greatest demand is for talent at the mid levels. And the younger you are, the more it's expected that you’ll have strong social media skills.” 

The hours: With the economy still on the slow road to recovery, companies are relying heavily on freelance help, rather than focusing entirely on those 40-hour-a-week fulltimers.

“Freelancers are a vital part of the mix because they allow companies, especially agencies, to manage ebbs and flows in client activity without committing to a full-time hire,” Jim says. “In addition, PR and communications have traditionally been—and likely will continue to be—female-dominated industries, and many women find freelancing a great way to build a business while raising a family.”

The resume: “Resumes no longer have to be one page—now that everyone’s resumes are digital, it’s fine to have a two- or even three-page resume, if your experience merits it,” Jim says. Other resume tips:

• List your clients: “In PR, you are who your clients are. That's what the hiring managers want to see.” 

• Make it a Word doc: “Recruiters typically want to logo-stamp resumes and can't do that with a PDF.  Also, if they find a last-minute typo or format error, they can correct it for you on the spot.”

• Use those job-description key words: “Resumes are often parsed or automatically searched for key words. If yours has them, you'll be scored higher by many HR departments.”

• Include your address and zip code. “Recruiters often search their databases by geography. If your resume was parsed and no address was found, you'll miss out when that recruiter is looking for someone in your home town!”

• Three references (reporter not required): Supervisor, peer and subordinate. 

The interview: “The biggest mistake people make is not preparing and not knowing everything they can about the firm and its business,” Jim says. “With everything that's online today, there's no excuse. Take the time to review all of the interviewers’ backgrounds on LinkedIn so that you're aware of their work history and can talk about any mutual acquaintances or common career threads.” Other interview tips:

• Show up on time. (Should be a no-brainer, but…)

• Be confident—but not over-confident. “You may be able to do the job in your sleep, but you don’t want to come off as cocky.”

• Be prepared with your own questions. “Bring energy, excitement, and curiosity, tempered with a professional demeanor.”

At least one thing hasn’t changed: You still need the perfect interview outfit. 

“You don’t want to misjudge the dress code,” Jim says. “It’s harder to do today, but it happens.”

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Designing Around Little Minds

September 29, 2013 

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In designing user interfaces, we aim to empower the “user” to understand and control the system at hand. Output via screens and speakers, with input from a keyboard, a touch screen or gestures. Between them, the “user” is understood to be our conscious “mind” – the logical bit of our brain that thinks it’s in charge.

This “mind” is actually not nearly as “in charge” as it thinks it is. In fact, our larger and often much more wise mind – the emotional, sub-conscious, parallel-processing, pattern recognizing part of our nervous system even manipulates and deceives our conscious mind. Articulated long ago as Dual Process Theory, Kahneman formalizes them as System 1 (this vast, quick and automatic aspect of thinking) and System 2 (the small “conscious” mind that logically considers and judges).

There is a basic fitness function to having our conscious mind feel confident, whether fighting, mating, or even making the small decisions that people make to get through a day. But the confidence we are building is with the small and logical part of our minds, deceiving ourselves that things are ok when another part of ourselves might know otherwise.

This is articulated in an experiment described by Trivers in which subjects are asked to listen to a series of voices, some of which are their own. Depending on the confidence of the subjects, some tended to attribute their voice to others … or conversely, mistake other voices as their own. The interesting thing was that the galvanic skin response that connects to our parasympathetic nervous systemalways reacted consistently to our own voices, even when our conscious minds were deceived. (Trivers 1985)

Whether it’s the decisions we make or the assessments of how we feel, we are consistently persuading ourselves that the world is organized and coherent, and that we understand what’s going on, most of the time. In fact, the world is complex and chaotic. Most of what goes on in the world -- and even in our own bodies -- is beyond the comprehension and (luckily) the control of our little minds.

Thus, good design communicates with the broader, faster, more emotional system. What we call the “flow state” or “in the zone” is just our little minds getting out of the way so that our bigger and more intuitive mind can run the show. Whether throwing a basketball or driving a car, if our logical minds were coordinating each step, it would be impossibly difficult to coordinate all of the steps. However, our little minds are “smart” enough to get out of the way when we have mastery and allow the rest of the system to dominate.

Why is it then that we seem to insist on building and assessing our systems based on what our little mind thinks? Think about the testing in schools that only measures local knowledge and logical skills, or designing user interfaces around what the user is focused on like pull-down menus and the mouse pointer.

I believe that we must focus much more on creating interfaces that send information to – and receive controls signals from – the rest of our system. This could apply to sensors for health, assistive robots, the Internet of things, thermostats, or future vehicles.

The problem is, individually and collectively, our little minds don’t like to give up control. We have to trick our minds to get out of the way sometimes. That’s where deception emerges as a design pattern.

In the late 1800s, James Naismith, a pastor and a physical education teacher in Springfield, Massachusetts realized that he needed a way to deal with young kids who would become restless and unruly during the harsh New England winters. He knew they needed the exercise, collaboration and competition they got the other nine months of the year.

So Naismith invented basketball, allowing kids to exercise indoors, to compete and collaborate, all through playing this fun new game. It worked swimmingly, and quickly spread through YMCAs and became the sport it is today. My bet is that if he had called it “social ball” or “don’t-beat-each-other-up ball” it probably wouldn’t have been nearly the hit that it was.

Was this subtle deception immoral? Was it effective? Which part of the mind was Naismith looking to address, and which part did he find ways to speak to?

Today, we spend so much time telling our conscious and self-deceived minds what we want it to do. What if we spent more time trying to induce our minds to get out of the way, through meditation, play, prayer ... or even deception. We need to think less like industrial designers (designing for the intentions of the conscious user) and more like game designers (designing for the desires and quick, “irrational” behavior of our mind.) We need to design our medical devices, computers, vehicles and communication tools to be influenced by what we really do and think. Not just what we tell ourselves we are doing or thinking.

--

Trivers, R. (1985). Social evolution. Menlo Park, Calif., Benjamin/Cummings Pub. Co.

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