From admitting they don’t want to be Number 1 to questioning what marketing is here to do, torpedoing their brand myths and admitting that their team knows less about up-and-coming digital channels than they should – there are a lot of thing you don’t hear marketers saying. My favourite thing about the Festival of Marketing last week was just how many of those things were suddenly coming out of speakers’ mouths.
Our industry is at its best when it’s challenging itself. Pushing back on whether we really understand the platforms we claim to be experts in, whether we’re really being honest with our audiences, and whether our brands or businesses are quite so magical as we sometimes make out. Here are six quotes that lay down the right types of challenges to brands – the challenges that help keep marketing strategy moving forward:
“In order to be effective we have to wrestle with why people are saying that the whole business of selling is bullshit” Alain de Botton
The sometime philosopher, travel writer and marketing consultant certainly knows how to get an audience’s attention. His point is that marketers need to stop pretending that their products solve deeper, emotional and spiritual needs – and start developing propositions that actually do so. He mentioned LinkedIn and Airbnb as the two businesses he’d had conversations with focused on making a more meaningful difference to people’s lives. Listening though, there was one point on which I had to disagree. Smart B2B marketers already know that their product they sell is just one aspect of how they need to make their customers’ lives better. I think we’re already further beyond the ‘bull’ than Alain de Botton gives us credit for.
“The honest answer is… we made a decision to prioritise content quality over channel expertise” Graham MacFadyn
It’s not often you hear a marketer publicly admitting that they prioritised one buzzy concept over another. When you think about it, that means a lot of marketers are hiding the truth – because at a time of limited budgets, businesses have to make tough calls like this all the time. Graham MacFadyn, the Head of Digital and Marketing Operations at the British Library stood out for the honesty with which he talked about the challenges of content marketing on a budget. It’s not that he isn’t interested in amplifying content across a range of different channels; it’s just that he decided that organising his team to create unique, original, expert content was more important. At the end of the day, such content is easier to amplify – even if you’re learning your channel expertise as you go.
"80% of success is showing up. We need to show up.” Keith Weed
Marketers like to think of themselves as hip, early adopting types. Unilever’s CMO knows different – and he thinks plenty of us need to take long, critical look at ourselves. Weed thinks that there’s still far too much bluffing when it comes to digital marketing and that part of the cause is that marketers themselves don’t live and breathe the platforms we’re relying on to reach audiences. He wants marketers to embrace the social, digital, mobile world that we inhabit; to cultivate real passion and enthusiasm for emerging social platforms; to develop more of an enthusiastic, start-up mindset; and to get serious about learning the skills that up and coming generations instinctively know. He even went so far as to introduce compulsory training at Unilever – and publicly name and shame those who resisted.
“The people who raised their hands to hear from you will leave you if you’re not relevant” Jason Miller
The most terrifying stat in content marketing is the amount of content that sits unused. As Jason pointed out, this content gets zero engagement because it’s not relevant to the people who encounter it. And the real trouble with irrelevant content isn’t that it’s ineffective – it’s that it damages your brand and sends your audience running for the hills. If brands are serious about content marketing, they need to commit to always providing their audience with content that adds value. It’s a move back to an editorial mindset; an acceptance of your responsibility to your followers/fans/subscribers; and it’s what brands need to do if they are to make content work for them.
“We’ve proved we can get a top 3 SEO ranking if we focus on what we want to be known for” Graham MacFadyn
He’s worth two entries on this list for the simple fact that he’s more transparent and honest that most marketers we’ve heard speak. Graham MacFadyn’s second unexpected quote doesn’t seem that groundbreaking – but it secretly is. Marketing leaders typically sit down in team meetings and announce that their website needs to get to Number 1 on Google. MacFadyn was different. He knew that the British Library would likely never overtake pages from Wikipedia and the BBC, but he also knew that didn’t really matter – getting to Number 3 would give his brand all the prominence it needed. By setting a realistic target, he was able to focus his content strategy and resources more effectively, decide on very specific questions for his content to answer – and motivate his team around the progress they were making. It’s a great example of setting the right targets for both SEO and content.
“We never did one company thing in a garage” Steve Wozniak
Few marketers would willingly torpedo their own myths – and the legends that have built up around their brands. But then, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is no ordinary marketer. His fresh, honest take on the founding of Apple does the rest of us a massive favour – because our ability to learn from that brand’s success has long been undermined by not knowing what actually went on. The myth that Steve Jobs never did any research is a particularly damaging one. It turns out that he did loads – he just didn’t like talking about it.
It’s been said that rock stars end up dying early deaths from excess because they try to copy Keith Richards without knowing what Keith Richards was actually like. The same can be true of would-be disruptive marketers and Jobs. As the Woz explained at Festival of Marketing, Apple wasn’t created by two kids in a garage; and it owed much of its early success to the marketing wisdom introduced by Mike Markkula (Apple’s third employee). If you’re looking to create a breakthrough proposition, don’t beat yourself up too much that you’re not magically coming up with ideas like Steve Jobs would. Turns out Steve Jobs didn’t always do that either.
Related articles