Whole Brain Marketing

The advantages of tradition

Not every sector is using digital marketing to the same extent. In the past 10 years, companies in the technology, media and telecommunications, professional services and financial services sectors have generally undergone greater digital transformation than consumer goods and industrial companies. Our survey indicates that within the consumer goods sector, 65 per cent of companies spent less than a quarter of their marketing budget on digital. By contrast, 45 per cent of respondents in professional services firms said that digital takes over half of their marketing budget.

While all the marketing leaders we spoke with agreed that digital will significantly shape the future of marketing, many saw traditional marketing as still vital, and urged caution in being too technology- focused. “The objective of marketers should be to delight consumers and make them dream,” says François Bazini, SVP global marketing excellence & international marketing at spirits manufacturer Beam Suntory.

“In my view, people have neither the time nor the desire for deep relationships with brands and, as a result, most social media marketing programmes are failures. Digital marketing is another story, but there too we have seen a lot of companies wasting money in ineffective banner/ display campaigns. This is due to ad blocking, fraud, unclear metrics, and/or poor creative. The good news is that even the big guys (e.g. P&G, Unilever) are waking up and we now know that brands should proceed carefully. But no one is more gullible than marketeers who feel like they’re missing out on a trend.”

As much as Verheijen values data analysts, he respects that traditional marketers are “masters in telling stories and bringing to life the brand strategy in all contacts with a customer.” The diverse skills required by the whole of the marketing team, skills that at first glance are at odds with each other, require “connecting and collaborating, with the brand always coming first,” he explains.

It is just as well that traditional marketing still plays an important role, as some companies struggle to gain enough information to fully utilise digital’s potential. It is difficult for a company to accrue data on customers they do not sell to directly. Unless the company forms partnerships with retail chains and similar channels, the data remains with the intermediary.

The two sides of marketing

While we know the brain is an integrated single system that works cohesively, there is a popular notion that divides people into “left- brain thinkers”, with a propensity for analytics, logic and a rational view of the world, and “right- brain thinkers”, predisposed towards vision, creativity, intuition and relationship- building. Applied to marketing, these terms are somewhat useful in describing what feels like a division of intellect in the marketing function.

Left- brain thinkers are seen as fact- based, data- oriented, rational, logical, workhorses. They gave CMOs what was called “decision support” in the Seventies, “executive support” in the Eighties, “business intelligence” in the Nineties, and finally “analytics” and “big data” today. Right- brain thinkers carry the creative drive: the ability to connect with the consumer, to communicate the essence of a brand through a great campaign, to “think outside the box” and bring moments of inspiration that lead to breakthroughs.

The two different types of marketers — right- versus leftbrained — don’t easily find common ground. Right- brain creative marketers may find it daunting to make use of the great proliferation of data, the disciplines of zero- based budgeting, and the need to demonstrate ROI. Equally, those who have never attempted to reason without all information present, those who have never engaged in storytelling or who flinch at the word “innovation” unless it is preceded by the word “technology”, may find such processes formidable. Three- quarters of marketing leaders in our survey felt that left- brain thinkers with their analytic, linear logic could be trained “to some extent” to be fully functioning “right- brain” creative thinkers. Atilla Cansun, chief marketing officer of Merck Consumer Health, falls into this camp: “Our experience shows that all marketers are very much trainable in the creative and innovative area, no matter how analytical their background.”

In a perfect world, marketers would possess all the necessary qualities that today’s marketing demands. They would offer the full armoury of creative and analytical skills; be shrewd, agile and culturally sophisticated commercial operators who are calculating and rational, yet visionary and intuitive. Such people are rare and extremely valuable. “The few marketers in my organisation that outperform the rest combine both creative and analytical,” says François Bazini at Beam Suntory. “They are very interested in marketing science and are avid readers of marketing books.”

Rarely do marketers possess all these qualities. A digital native with extensive training in data analytics may not yet have the experience to provide marketing wisdom and depth of insight. Experienced traditional marketers may feel displaced by the amount of value placed on data analytics. Leaders must sensitively combine hiring new talent with team development and offer “legacy marketers” opportunities to increase their digital skills. Employers should be reasonable in their expectations, and remember that they, too, are being evaluated by the next generation of marketers who look carefully at “employer brands” when deciding where they want to invest their talent.

Managing talent

To create an optimal mix of skills in the marketing function, leaders need the self- knowledge to understand where their own natural bias lies — towards logic or magic, so to speak — and be willing to cultivate new skills and understanding within the organisation, as well as to look externally for talent.

Only six per cent of marketing leaders in our survey felt equipped to develop from within their own organisation a sufficient balance of digital acumen (or “logic”) and creative marketing sense (“magic”). Nearly 80 per cent of respondents said that they would need to combine developing their existing team with hiring expertise from outside sources. In the past 12 months, 51 per cent of CMOs have set up digital marketing training for their teams and 30 per cent have hired an internal data/ analytics expert to join the marketing function.

It is not always easy to hire and retain the talent required. Peter Duffy, chief commercial officer of easyJet, explains: “Our challenge is the talent pipeline, which is tough and getting tougher. Our best people are aggressively headhunted. We hire young Europeans with strong academic credentials who understand brand proposition. Increasingly, we are also looking for highly specialised skills in the area of artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced analytics.”

A study by the CMO Council found that 80 per cent of marketers and 88 per cent of IT professionals believe that working together is critical to ensure customercentricity. At easyJet, says Duffy, “the traditional silo approach is untenable in the new world of big data. The contact centre needs to understand CRM; CRM needs to understand the brand; the brand needs to be informed by the data coming out of CRM. The boundaries have broken down and the marketing director’s role is to be the orchestrator.”

Micha Medendorp, chief marketing officer of Rituals, concurs. “As business becomes more digital and therefore marketing becomes more digital, organisations become more connected. Silos won’t do anymore; they hinder agility and holistic solutions.”

Some companies help to foster understanding within their groups by as much cross- exposure as possible. Speaking at the Spencer Stuart CMO Summit on “Tomorrow’s CMO: Chief Magic or Logic Officer?”, Lisa Bacus, EVP and global chief marketing officer of US health services company Cigna, described how they use rotational assignments to help mix talent among their newer marketing team members, and develop training programmes to develop additional skills. Cigna does a lot of test- and- learn around ideas, big and small, as well as sending out problem statements to the entire organisation and inviting responses from their 35,000 people. “It’s amazing where these ideas come from,” says Bacus, who acknowledges that there are those who prefer one habit of thought to another, but feels that by focusing on overall strategy, “you can apply both the creative and the analytical”.

This same flexibility is expressed by Massimiliano Benedetti, chief marketing officer of online fashion retailer Yoox. He too finds that internal job rotation fosters the development of both analytic and creative approaches to marketing decisions. Indeed, Benedetti has experienced first- hand the benefits of learning to think in ways far outside his initial training, as his own background was as an engineer. His initiation into the fashion industry, attending shows and getting to know designers and entrepreneurs, required significant adjustment.

The persistent challenge for increasing the use of big data tools and techniques is their complexity and “black box” nature. This can make it difficult to trust and understand the output of big data approaches and to convince others of the value and accuracy of the insights the tools produce. Marketers can reduce the mystery around big data — and increase buy- in — in a number of important ways. First, by building capabilities that are intrinsically reinforcing and relatively easy to use. Second, by providing a number of smaller applications for using advanced analytics data that demonstrate its value and invites buy- in across functions. Finally, by collaborating with other functional leaders on which questions the organisation should be trying to answer with data, and creating transparency around the process.

A balanced approach

Because digital technology can expand radically the scope and power of marketing, it is easy to imagine any digital initiative as an improvement. However, data is only as valuable as the intelligence applied to it. By working together, people with a range of marketing skills can take advantage of the opportunities that data can provide, determine what is important, what requires testing, and what actions can be taken upon analysis of the results.

While personalised marketing gives the customer the sense that there is something specific for them to buy today, it requires companies to diversify their content and offers, and to constantly update their approach based on recent customer activity. Creative use of digital marketing may require an equally creative use of traditional marketing and product development in order to deliver a diversity of offers, products, and services.

As artificial intelligence becomes a larger component of digital, it is expected to deliver greater returns on investment with much less effort. Among other things, AI can analyse buying patterns, provide customer recommendations, prevent fraud, create dynamic pricing optimisation, track inventory and engage in social media. Part of AI’s application in marketing is about improving the consumer experience by creating what feels to be a highly targeted, personalised interaction. Algorithms produce everything at speed, creating massive efficiency gains. However, if they go wrong, they can amplify error and quickly erode brand reputation.

Conclusion

While it is true that marketing has been profoundly transformed by the escalating scope and power of big data and analytics, its fundamentals remain the same. Digital innovation has expanded marketing thinking, improving judgement with better facts and insights, but it hasn’t replaced any of its functions. There is no technology as yet that can approximate the imagination of a human being. We can create machines that can teach themselves, but it remains to be seen to what extent machines will acquire the defining features of the human mind that allow us to think inventively, even ingeniously, and to take control of the world around us.

For now, marketers need the power of the imagination, the magic of the magic, even as the range and applications of the digital world grow. The marketing leaders we interviewed are seeking to expand their digital capabilities while remaining grounded, fostering a positive environment that allows their teams to cooperate. As Verheijen sums up, “The CMO’s role is to create an environment in which both groups flourish and work together effectively.”