For the past century, marketers have provided value by combining best practices with conventional wisdom and intuition and applying that knowledge across a platform of the latest, greatest tools and channels. In short, they mastered sets of “rules and tools” relevant in their time period. This is the Old Marketing Value Chain, as introduced last Friday.
Throughout the 20th century, a number of people articulated the “rules and tools” based approach of their day. In 1923, Claude Hopkins argued that there are rules of advertising that, as long as they were understood and followed, would make success both attainable and repeatable (predictable!). His successors included advertising great David Oglivy in the 1960s, and marketing consultants Al Ries and Jack Trout in the 1990s. Similar claims are being made today by various players who provide guidance around things like demand generation or multichannel marketing.
Mastery of marketing tools can also be traced to the beginning of the 20th century. At that time, mail order advertising and the effective use of samples were state-of-the-art marketing tools. Pioneers such as Lester Wunderman (hailed as the “Father of Direct marketing”) carved their niche by learning these tools of marketing better than anyone else. Today, many companies take the same approach, focusing on mastery of technology platforms for marketing automation and CRM integration, or channels such as social media, for example.
Combining best practices, conventional wisdom and intuition, and then applying this knowledge across the latest and greatest tools and channels is how marketing delivered its value. The more you knew about such “rules and tools,” the thinking went, the more predictable your outputs would be.
While effective to a point, old-chain techniques fall far short of achieving predictability. The Old Marketing Value Chain displays two significant limitations:
Marking conditions are not constant. Strict adherence to “rules” suggest that conditions are constant and within the marketer’s control. They are not. In today’s marketing environment, many conditions are dynamic, such as rapidly-changing customer behaviors and competitive “noise.” Rules that work in some conditions may be ineffective or even detrimental in others.
Marketing tools continue to evolve with the times. A tool-based approach does not sufficiently acknowledge that marketing tools are also dynamic. Even the best marketing analytics software in use today is just the best current option. Evolving technology can unseat even the most entrenched tools (just ask Blackberry). What’s more, even if you have the latest and greatest tools, your competitors are never far behind in acquiring tools that are just as good.
The more dynamic the environment, the greater the likelihood of waste occurring in a “rules and tools” based value chain. Because we live in a world that is now in a constant state of flux, this has become a serious problem. While this approach can still lead to successful marketing outcomes, the odds of it doing so have decreased as unpredictability has increased.
Unfortunately the demands on marketing practitioners have also increased. CMOs are transitioning away from soft success measures. Expectations of marketing accountability have increased to the levels expected of sales performance. Today, more predictability is required, not less.
Photo credit: Barbara Willi via Flickr Creative Commons
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