Marketing technology is the most powerful change to marketing and business is known history. This presentation covers key aspects of how to avoid the problems and incorporates the considerations to use marketing and digital technology best in companies.

1. 12 July 2017
The everyday fallacies of marketing
technology

2. I am often amazed about the lack of business
logic when people talk about marketing
technology.
Herein I cover a few of the more serious issues I
have come across

4. 1. Marketing technology fundamentally changes
organisations, it is not (only) a new set of tools
It all started with:
ORGANISATIONAL
AUTOMATION
=
EFFICIENCY (with a
few prominent
CRM systems )
Now moved to:
CUSTOMER
CENTRICITY
=
EFFECTIVENESS
NEW
BUSINESS
OPERATING
MODELS
How the
organisation
needs to
organise its
operations
around the
customer
The move
from old
to new
technology

5. Data unlocks:
• Retention & growth targeting.
• Customer & behavioural insight.
• Resource focus.
• Product, service, message and creative targeting.
• Channel alignment.
• Attribution.
• Agility and appropriate re-targeting.
• More agile content, placement and potentially better
targeted channel decisions.

7. 2. Unless executive management is involved in
marketing technology, nothing will change
Marketing
technology
is not only a
CIO
issue
The CEO & CMO
must both
engage
with technology
Whilst the
organisational view
must be from the
“outside-in” it needs
to be designed from
the “inside out”
The executive
priorities & KPI’s
needs to be
realigned: most
organisations
will fail at this
It is an
overall IT
systems
issue
Consumers do
not discriminate
between hi-tech
& hi-touch
interfaces, they
want them
seamless

9. 3. Creativity of content is now MORE important than
ever before = relevance, impact & sharing

10. This is one of the more astounding comments I hear,
that creativity of message expression is no longer important
today, hence that the role of agency suppliers in that respect is
redundant. That technology supersedes creativity.
Frankly, it may be the only role they will have left in some
time.
SIMPLE QUESTION: DO YOU READ A BORING FACEBOOK POST,
TWITTER FEED OR LINKEDIN POST? Even from a good friend?
THAT’S YOUR ANSWER.
The higher the “noise”, the greater the challenge to break
through it…

11. In developed countries, a person may be exposed to 10
000 to 20 000 pieces of communications a day…
Historically, there has been a high correlation between marketing creativity and brand sales.
Not always, but generally creative ads are more effective.
Yet, “uncreative” ads were often successful because brands could simply spend so much money
on exposing them, that their sheer dominance worked. Or they became controversial.
In social media, it is even clearer, original, relevant, good and creative content is shared, weak
content is not.
The best examples of social media impact, has always been because of actuality, relevance,
originality, usefulness or humour.
With the sheer VOLUME of content today, creating impact will just become increasingly
difficult.
This means there is almost an inverse correlation between the availability of channels, the
number of messages of and the degree of impact of any given message.

13. 4. Brands are now more important than before: strong
brands are more profitable than weak brands
Apple is more profitable than Samsung.
Most if it has to do with the integrity built into the products of the brand.
Both have similar technology access.
Yet, one uses technology better and the brand is worth more as a result.
It is not the technology that is available, it is how it is used.

14. YET, may brands are in serious trouble and they will find it very hard to create
sufficient differentiation not to simply become commoditised. This
predominantly includes sectors like those listed below, but it will expand fast:
this is one of the greatest challenges the digital age brought to brands, how to
create consumer value consumers will pay for.
As long as the basis
of investment lies in
returns, brands will
need to create
better value than
their rivals… how?

15. 5. Comparative sites reduce many brands to commodities: you
simply buy the cheapest: this is almost the converse of the
creativity argument!

16. Whilst comparative sites offer value, brands want to create preference.
Often, innovation is a driving force that enables that.
Should all brands become “equalised” through dis-intermediation, it will
change the entire supply & demand landscape and marketing in totality. All
categories will commoditise.
Whilst there is a real possibility that this will happen and that it is already
happening in some categories, it will also mean the nature of competition
and resource deployment by companies will totally change.
Whilst not all consumers will “fall” for the value offering, many will. Hence
there will always remain space for niche and specialist brands aimed at
specific target market segments.
Yet, the commoditisation of many product & service categories is a real
possibility. This may be the biggest change brought about by technology. It
is far easier to do, than for a company to become customer-centric.

17. 6. Brand choice has become commoditised, bland and downright
boring, price is all that matters, even if it is easy to compare –
but what does that do to brand differentiation? Simple fact, the
large will get larger
Yet, to do this well, means brands will have to move beyond simple
predictive analytics. The fact that I went to Paris last week does not mean I
want to go again this week. Re-targeting needs a serious review.

18. 7. Brand functionality remains paramount, a simple personal story
will illustrate this

19. Much has been made about Unilever acquiring Dollar Shave Club. Mainly to
give it access to the consumer data.
I must admit, the brand is well designed & positioned.
I have been using a similar UK product for the last year now, and just stopped
using it. Why?
1. Despite great packaging and design, the product does not work any better
than the best brands in the trade. It is basically the same.
2. The packaging is too big, albeit beautifully designed, so I need to collect it
from the Post Office if I am not at home when it is being delivered. This is
not convenient.
3. Despite them trying to sell me other products, I don’t need them. They
may off course offer me some products I will buy, but I will only buy those if
they offer functionality I am not receiving anywhere else.
4. Timing is an issue, whereas I bought shaving blades when I did shopping
anyway, I found that my usage frequencies vary depending upon the
number of times I use it in a given month – and even if these are similar,
they are not identical.

22. 8. The tech vendor explosion means the industry is not
customer focused, but vendor focused. That means
clients may start with the solution without fully
understanding the challenge

23. Both with marketers and consumers,
greater choice has brought greater complexity. With marketers, more roles,
more suppliers, more technology, more demands about campaign
attribution.

24. The problem with this is fourfold:
1. Client confusion as to the best solutions. There are so
many and more every day. Like in industry today, you
don’t have to be “big” to be clever.
2. Vendors are all “pushing” their solutions as the best. In
most industries, no one vendor is the best at everything.
Hence, hybrids are almost a given.
3. The discussion is dominated not by solutions, but by
vendor offers. So how does a given client make a given
vendor solution work, not the question of what vendor
offers the best solution first. Some vendors are simply
too powerful now, even though they may be very good.
4. Vendors become increasingly important marketing
suppliers, in fact, at the core of it all.
Each year, the so called Lumascape of vendor
technology software exponentially grows…

25. 9. Despite the former, a few vendors dominate,
therein lies a danger, regardless of how good they are

27. 10. Even with the available technology, most agency
partners are not able to align output to create seamless
customer engagements, still creating fragmented
customer experiences

29. 11. Technology will solve all organisational ills –
as the by now famous Business Model Canvas states,
delivering a customer value proposition requires
aligning many resources

30. Organisations are not structurally or culturally adapted to new
communications technology
• Despite words like ”customer service”, customer needs surveys, NPS
scores, large segmentation studies being used for years, most companies
are not consumer-centric. Even if technology is able to overcome this, will
the real intent and organisational alignment follow?
• Lack of empowerment of most staff, even senior staff.
• Most companies cannot interact 24/7/365 with its stakeholders.
• Silo’s means a “disconnect” between what happens in organisations and
the value it delivers to stakeholders and end-users. What we produce and
what we do, are not the same!
– How does every action contribute to stakeholder satisfaction?
– Many CEO’s cannot even answer that!
• It will require an “unpacking” and “repacking” of how value is created.
• Business technology & marketing technology are intricately linked. This
means in the new era, marketing IS the business.

31. Companies will have to move from “closed” to “open”
systems. Most are not able to do that. This means “re-
building” the business around the consumer with
greater agility to respond to environmental changes

32. Closed systems…
• Most organisations are still hierarchical.
• Even competitively they are “closed systems” – Gary Hamel says “99% of
what you need to know about the future, happens outside of your
industry”.
• Most organisations are silo’d. Divisional.
• There is often no clarity between what staff does in their daily tasks - and
what the customer experiences. The purpose of what staff does, is
unclear. How does every action satisfy consumer needs?
• Information flows, purposes, accuracy, access are silo’d and not usable,
mostly built around other purposes (financial reporting systems) not
around consumers.
• Technology is also often bought without a proper assessment of
requirements. Hence there are many redundant systems in companies. Or
badly integrated systems.

33. 12. A brand is more than the sum of its parts – it is the whole
experience the customer has
• Steve Jobs, Apple Inc. Akia Morita, Sony. These two people are icons of
great product design, the one in the last century, the former more
recently.
– Strong brands are valuable value-propositions. They really offer something that is good
and that works.
– Strong brands use intuition, listening, innovation to interpret… so even though these
kinds of people do not do formal consumer research, they are intuitively attuned with
their environment and the people they design products for.
• Brand is often still seen as “a marketing, advertising or identity thing” –
that whilst strong brands have inherent integrity or functionality.
• It was not different before and is no different now, the only difference is
that lack on integration between brand touch points are more evident
faster.
– Apple is a fully “integrated” brand, see overleaf how all its aspects combine to deliver
one distinctive value proposition with real profit margin value.

34. Apps
iTunes
Marketing
Stores
StaffiCloud
ApplePay
Packaging
Television
All aspects of the
Apple brand are
integrated around a
single customer value
value
proposition

36. So what?
• Whilst some new brands will just be “flanking irritations” to the large
brands, many industries will entirely disrupt.
• Where brands have no discerning benefits, they will simply die.
• How will hi-tech & hi-touch combine? Will consumers still experience
fragmented touchpoints?
• Will executives be willing and able to truly transform their entire
organisations around the consumer? Despite the risks both ways?
• Will technology dominate rather than what the company customers really
need and want? Within the history of technology, systems were often
bought without proper analysis of the unique needs of the organisations.
• Will many organisations start new ventures using new technology and run
those in conjunction with their existing one’s?

37. What we do know,
is that uncertainty is the greatest
certainty today.
Rebels thrive in uncertainty, risk averse
people and companies fail.