Fetch Water, Chop Wood

A few themes have come together for me recently. Firstly, I was reminded of an old Chinese saying; “Before enlightenment, fetch water, chop wood. After enlightenment, fetch water, chop wood”. Another was a post on LinkedIn going into the background of the phrase, “if you can’t measure it, you cannot manage it”. Then there was the tidal wave of comment on the Jaguar re-brand and product launch which, actually, wasn’t. Finally, there was a Mark Ritson commenting about media and the long term effectiveness of TV advertising following a research post and the comments to the effect of, “Advertising isn’t marketing” which accompanied it.

So how can these four disparate thoughts be brought together, to square the circle of debate around the value of marketing which has followed, in the wake of the Jaguar debacle?

A new class of job is now being advertised under the headings of “Advertising Effectiveness” or “Marketing Mix Modelling”. I always thought it was the job of the marketing manager or director to plan the resource allocation in the marketing mix and, similarly, judge its effectiveness. Perhaps this is an example of marking your own homework, but given the number of marketing heads I have seen rolling down the road to the JobCentre, I had never considered it unduly lenient. So I can only assume the ivory tower of marketing is, once again, under attack for lack of both effectiveness and accountability. I don’t find this surprising. Where we once had Marketing, we now have Performance Marketing, MarTech, Insights, Data Analytics, Marketing Communications, Marketing Operations and a whole load of other sub categories which you could be forgiven for thinking are there to muddy the waters about what works and what doesn’t, while maintaining and increasing marketing budgets. What used to be just Marketing is now Full Stack Marketing, a retronym like Wild Swimming or Snail Mail.

If you are running Amazon or the marketing department of a major FMCG business, there may be some merit in this. The more subcontract agencies and reports you have the more important you are and the more lunches and awards ceremonies you get invited to. Similarly, if you are a CMO for an uber cool VC funded SAAS Start-Up relying entirely on digital marketing you may feel inclined to run everything off MMM, MarTech and GA4. Although looking at the current controversy over programmatic adspend fraud you may find yourself regretting that decision.

However, to the common, humble UK Marketing Manager, things look rather different:

• SMEs account for around 60% of UK employment.

• They contribute approximately half of the total turnover in the private sector.

• SMEs make up over 99% of all UK businesses.

Furthermore, the majority of UK SMEs operate in what might be considered the B2B sector. Although there has been a rise in D2C and hybrid models, the preponderance of SMEs as suppliers to larger businesses means this is still the largest sector. 

Then there is the fact that according to a 2021 report by the Institute for Family Business, 85.9% of UK private sector businesses are family-owned and run. So the chances of the Marketing Director being married to the person sitting at the head of the boardroom, or kitchen, table are pretty high. This tends to work against a premier league football manager style approach to hiring and firing.

Similarly, given the above numbers, is a professional market research journal highlighting TV advertising as effective in the long term going to deliver a rush to include TV advertising in the future marketing mix of UK businesses? I would hazard a “No” to that.

You can measure, to some degree, the numbers within a so called performance marketing campaign; OTS, CTR, CoA etc and, to some extent, CROI and LTV. You can also work out the metrics of a trade promotion or brand partnership. Can you measure the CROI of posters, signage and exhibition attendance? No. What about local Radio, Press, Sponsorship, PR, Merchandise and Print? I didn’t think so.

So, if you are adopting a “Full Stack” marketing approach, as most UK businesses will be, what numbers are you going to feed into your MMM tool? What metrics will you be using as benchmarks in Salesforce, Adobe, Hubspot or whatever MarTech platform you have adopted.

Obviously these things have a place and a value, but they are nowhere near as relevant to real world marketing as LinkedIn users would like to believe. Do we trust UK heads of marketing to make their decisions without investing in MMM? I would say so. So is the average Linkedin post about mental availability of any help or relevance to someone wondering why the factory is making green widgets when all the orders are for blue ones? Possibly not.

So, given the marketing function of most businesses is run by someone without the benefit of a diploma from the Ehrenberg Bass Institute, a Mark Ritson Mini, or even a real, MBA, are we being just a little patronising when we imply they give non measurable criteria undue weight? I would say abso-***king-luteley. 

The prime consideration in whether a marketing head is good at their job is knowledge of their market. The prime consideration in resource allocation within the marketing mix is knowledge of the market. A good Marketing Director may bring in help from agencies, freelances or staff with expertise in specific disciplines such as data analysis in the same way they would hire a graphic designer, but they should always make decisions based on facts as seen through the filter of their experience. 

By all means teach good marketing practice. Standards definitely need to improve, but results are not measured by focus groups. They are measured by sales. If your marketing department is not up to scratch, the results are there for all to see without the need for a report from an advertising effectiveness manager.

By far the largest part of every marketing person’s day is spent putting into effect the marginal improvements in a traditional strategy suggested by analysis of each iteration of tactical implementation and, yes, a lot of that is writing, designing and placing copy in target media, whether paid, organic, social, print or broadcast. So, yes, 90% of the time, marketing is advertising.

So here is my conclusion: Before MMM; write copy, book media. After MMM; write copy, book media.