The New Marketing

How to Win in the Digital Age

Cheryl Burgess, Mark Burgess

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781529737400
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

In our hyper-connected world that is changing at warp speed, marketers recognize the need to shift from traditional marketing methods to a new way that can help them better navigate the unpredictable environment. For traditionalists, this change has posed a challenge. Many have tried to incorporate new approaches into the old models they grew up with, only to be frustrated with the results. From the bestselling authors of The Social Employee, andLinkedIn Learning course authors, comes a powerful new textbook that cracks the marketing code in our hyper-focused digital age.

The New Marketing, with contributions spanning CMO trailblazers to martech disruptors, behavioral economics luminaries at Yale to leading marketing thinkers at Kellogg and Wharton, is a GPS for navigating in a digital world and moves the craft of marketing through the forces of marketing transformation.

We can't predict the future. But our goal is to help make Masters/MBA students and marketing practitioners future-ready and successful.

Part 1 Marketing Transformation in a Digital World

1 Challenges Facing the New Marketing Organization

Learning Goals

• Analyze the concept of marketing transformation and the need to redefine marketing as a strategic asset to drive business growth.
• Build a broad working overview of the current challenges facing marketers as a profession.
• Adopt a marketing mindset that allows for success in the short-term and promotes growth in the long-term.
• Analyze what marketers can do to create success in the present while still preparing for a changing future.
• What is the role of the CMO in the future?

The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

Rob Siltanen¹

In the fall of 1989, Universal Pictures released Back to the Future Part II, the follow-up to the smash 1985 hit starring Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd. Throughout the first act of the film, protagonists Marty McFly (Fox) and Doc Brown (Lloyd) find themselves 30 years in the future – in the faraway year of 2015 – where they struggle to navigate the technological and culture shock of this strange and advanced era.

Back to the Future Part II’s vision of the future was instantly iconic and recognizable, capturing the imagination of audiences and futurists alike. In the decades since the film’s release, fans have delighted in pointing out all the incongruities between creator Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale’s eighties-inspired vision of 2015 and the actual 2015 that came to pass. Even today, with 2015 quickly receding in the rearview mirror, you don’t have to poke around the internet for long before you come upon someone playfully lamenting, ‘Where’s my hoverboard?’ or ‘Where’s my flying car?’

Still, while many of Back to the Future Part II’s predictions still haven’t come to pass (personally, we’re still waiting for those instant pizza ovens), the movie actually got quite a bit right. The Hill Valley, California, of 2015 has plenty of features familiar to us today, such as flatscreen TVs, video conferencing, smart clothing, wearable tech, thumbprint ID scanners, augmented reality (AR), and even the Chicago Cubs finally winning the World Series (even if it took them an extra year to pull it off in the real world).

Just like in science fiction, when it comes to predicting the future of marketing, we inevitably end up with a mixed bag of results. However, as any marketer would attest, the best way to paint an accurate picture of the future is to understand what’s happening in the present.

Today, advances in technology, data and analytics have shifted marketing into a new era we call marketing transformation. In our ever-changing and hyper-connected world, marketers are recognizing the need to shift from traditional marketing methods toward a new approach that can help them better navigate an unpredictable environment.

For traditionalists, this shift has posed a challenge. Many have tried to incorporate newer approaches into the old models they grew up with, only to be frustrated with the results. However, to succeed at marketing transformation, the marketers of both the present and the future must learn to shift toward a more integrated, digital, personalized and AI-driven approach that creates frictionless, empathetic, customer experiences across all relevant touchpoints.

Welcome to The New Marketing.

Think of this chapter as your roadmap for the chapters ahead. Here we will explore the six big challenges facing modern marketers and the specific considerations those challenges involve. In later chapters, we’ll dive into each of these current marketing trends in greater detail. Here, our goal is simply to help you get your bearings, understand the current marketing landscape, and begin to navigate through it.

Challenge #1: Content Marketing

Content marketing is the process by which brands create, curate and share engaging, informative brand-related content as a way of building brand value and generating leads in the digital marketplace – and it’s a big part of any marketing future. Unfortunately, many brands either lack a content marketing strategy entirely or struggle to execute the strategy they do have. For many brands, their content marketing struggles boil down to one or more of the following issues.

Many modern brands find themselves stuck at a crossroads between traditional methods and modern approaches. They want to change, but they’re unsure how to go about it. This has led to a proliferation of marketing consulgencies – consulting and agency hybrids – who are leading the way in teaching brands how to adapt to a new future.

Spamming Customers

As we’ll explore in the following chapters, at the core of good content marketing is brand storytelling, which enables marketers to make an emotional connection with customers. The goal is not just to put content out there, but also to encourage your audience to share and engage. By providing them content that connects and has value, marketers can make huge leaps toward earning their audience’s trust.

No Distribution Network

As more organizations learn to flood channels with content, standing out from the pack is getting harder than ever. In some ways, the basic approach to distribution remains the same – that is, brands still want to leverage a combination of paid, owned and earned media (the POEM approach) to connect with their audience. Today, however, measurement and modification are everything. The most successful brands have embraced a process of micro-optimizations at the end of each phase of the customer journey in order to better attract attention.²

Matching the Content with the Audience

Modern brands have embraced the concept of longtail marketing – selling large volumes of a niche product to a specific audience. However, in order for that to work, marketers must be able to understand, target and reach that audience so they can market more efficiently.³

Leveraging Content to Become a Social Brand

Most brands in the twenty-first century agree that, whether you’re a business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C) brand, it’s essential to create a social media presence to engage with your target audience and guide them along the customer journey. The question is, how do you do that successfully and in a way that resonates with your audience?

As you’ll see in the chapters that follow, the top three answers are content, content, and content. That said, having a plan for sharing that content is paramount. The best social brands have a clearly defined social media and content sharing strategy, and they know how to create content in a variety of different forms (i.e. video, images, blogs), which audiences to share that content with, and what channel they should share it on. Finally, they know that without outstanding customer engagement and service, the best content in the world is effectively moot; a complete brand creates value through every stage of the funnel.

Optimizing for Voice Search

Some of you may be wondering, ‘What could voice search possibly have to do with content marketing?’ As more and more brands are discovering, a lot. Consumers are increasingly turning to their in-home or in-hand smart devices – powered by Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, or Microsoft’s Cortana – to answer their questions, order useful products, plan trips, and so on.

Solving the Content Marketing Puzzle

Speaking broadly, the big challenge posed by content marketing is that it exists outside of the old status quo. To succeed with their content marketing efforts, marketers need to shift from outdated, traditional marketing approaches and embrace the new opportunities provided by content marketing. To learn how brands are meeting this challenge, see Chapters 6, 7 and 12.

Challenge #2: Consumer Behavior

The rise of the internet and the digital age didn’t just change how we access information; it also fundamentally changed the way we behave as consumers. To succeed in today’s landscape, the modern marketer must understand what those changes mean and how to anticipate and adapt to changing consumer behavior. To do that, they’ll need to overcome the following consumer behavior-related challenges.

The Rise of Brand Purpose

Marketing has shifted away from the attention economy and toward the emotion economy. To thrive in this new paradigm, it’s not enough to deliver a product or service. Like Nike with their embrace of controversial football player Colin Kaepernick, brands must be willing to stand for a cause or a concept that their target buyers will believe in. Many refer to this as purpose-driven marketing – creating a customer experience (CX) around core values rather than product features as a way of attracting and retaining customers.

The Customer Journey

Marketers have put forth many different models for understanding and managing the customer journey over the years. From the well-worn AIDA model (attention, interest, desire and action) to McKinsey & Company’s Customer Decision Journey,⁴ brands have certainly had their pick of models to help understand their relationship to their customers. However, with changes in the consumer landscape come changes in how we fundamentally understand the customer journey.

In Chapter 4, we will discuss newer customer journey models, including the New Consumer Odyssey™ and Gartner’s New B2B Buying Journey. Also, with so many different customer journey models to choose from, we’ll also discuss whether customer journeys are becoming too much of a maze.

The Need for New Marketing Research Methods

In many ways, the internet represents the greatest market research tool that brands have ever had access to. But while the problem used to be that brands didn’t have access to enough customer information, today the challenge is that there might be too much. Where do brands even begin to understand their audience?

As we’ll see in the chapters that follow, marketing researchers are applying a variety of different approaches, from breakthroughs in neuroscience to pioneering work in social listening. In fact, some organizations, such as Omnicom’s sparks & honey, go even further, helping clients become culture-centric, informing their innovation strategy by how culture is evolving in the here and now, and identifying the disruptive trends that create business transformation opportunities for the long-term future.

Understanding the Differences between B2B and B2C Customers

It’s not eno...