Zena Churchill is the Director of Max & Buddy Marketing Experts with experience managing marketing teams and agency teams. Here Zena discusses with Darren the challenges facing organisations in adapting and responding to the complex changes within the market and they explore the opportunities provided in General Stanley McChrystal’s book Team of Teams for organisations to restructure as a way of becoming future proof.
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Transcription:
Darren:
Welcome to Managing Marketing and today I’m sitting down with Zena Churchill, who is one of the senior consultants here at TrinityP3 and really someone with a deep interest and expertise in marketing and marketing structures and processes, welcome Zena.
Zena:
Thanks Darren, thanks for having me.
Darren:
I say that because you’ve run marketing departments haven’t you? You’ve had senior roles as a senior marketer.
Zena:
I have. I’ve had several opportunities to run quite diverse and complex marketing teams across multiple industries; actually, client side and agency side. I think that with the work that I do here at TrinityP3, it gives me quite a good well rounded perspective of when we’re dealing with clients, what needs to happen when we’re talking about the structures.
Darren:
The world is changing isn’t it? You must have noticed in your career from, let’s not name how many years ago but from then until now it’s like this constant sense of change.
Zena:
It’s unbelievable and I think more so in maybe the last five years. The speed of change is I think catching a lot of people unawares, unprepared, and a little off guard in how they go about now preparing to move forward for the future.
Darren:
Now I shared Keith Weeds’ article in one of the online magazines (Trade Press) where he said, ‘and marketers, the change is just going to get faster’ and I had a couple of people comment ‘oh nothing’s really changed–the same principles apply’ and that’s not what he was talking about.
Keith Weed who’s the CMO at Unilever was talking about the change of application. Would you agree the principles of marketing are roughly the same; it’s just the way we do it?
Zena:
Absolutely. The principles of marketing are the same. I think unfortunately the perception of marketing in the business is not changing as quickly as it probably should. But while the principles are the same, the way we have to market and the way we have to skill our teams to market, has changed. So yeah, principles completely the same really, it’s just the application is very much different and the skills needed for that application are very different today.
Darren:
There’s also a lot more inter-dependency isn’t there? Marketing doesn’t exist in a vacuum or a bubble any more does it?
Zena:
No, it doesn’t and a couple of the previous roles I’ve had where we were, and yes let’s not mention my age, but we were at the cusp of digital marketing becoming a real force in the marketing ring net that we were still very much segregated, with IT sits over there and does IT things and the digital person sits over there and does digital things, and you only speak when you need to come together.
That’s not the case anymore, there needs to be that skill set in marketing to be able to effectively work across the business to deliver.
Darren:
I think it’s recognition that the customer experience which is really the most powerful thing to create brand in their mind actually occurs everywhere in the business ecosystem, it doesn’t just occur in marketing and advertising.
Zena:
Absolutely and that reminds me actually of a project that we’ve worked on recently, but in a conversation with somebody in the marketing team where their KPI was the customer app to be able to deliver proper customer service quickly in the palm of the customer’s hand. That was their remit, that was what they were being measured on but nobody had told IT.
Darren:
(laughing)
Zena:
So, when the app went down this marketing person was facing hurdles and obstacles at every step of the way to get the app fixed as quickly as possible and back into being able to deliver on customer service. IT didn’t care, it wasn’t their remit, they didn’t understand their importance in that customer journey role but they are absolutely at the forefront of delivering.
Darren:
And could I dare say that when the app doesn’t work and the customer gets on the phone and phones the call centre, the call centre didn’t know that it was highly important and so they stormed down to one of the retail outlets and the retail staff haven’t been told the app’s important and so on and so on.
Zena:
That’s exactly right.
Darren:
A lot of CMO’s, especially CMO’s say to me around 80% of their job is just talking to all of the stakeholders and trying to get alignment. Some of them use the old herding cats analogy but it’s this complexity isn’t it? It’s making marketing such a challenge.
Zena:
Absolutely and the last corporate role I had absolutely 80% of my role was managing stakeholders.
Darren:
Internally and externally.
Zena:
Internally and externally but the internal I felt took more out of me than dealing with the external and it shouldn’t be that way. We shouldn’t have to start every meeting explaining why each stakeholder is sitting at the table and why it’s important we get our things done. We should just know that we all need to come together and you don’t get anything done effectively in that situation.
Darren:
That’s really interesting and I’m just wondering whether it’s because externally stakeholders are either suppliers where they’re beholden to you for revenue and income or they’re buyers where the relationship is very clearly defined. Whereas internally it’s like we’re all equal, we’re all the same so we’re going to go off and do something completely different.
Zena:
Absolutely, I couldn’t agree with you more and I think the easiest way to say it, with external partners or suppliers or stakeholders there is that power difference so you can tell people what to do.
Darren:
Or do what they tell you to do.
Zena:
But internally you have to negotiate.
Darren:
The whole time.
Zena:
All the time and that is draining and time consuming and it also takes your focus off what’s really important, which is delivering your brand to the consumer in the best possible way for the best possible outcome.
Darren:
Building those relationships so that people are more likely to choose your brand and your business over anyone else.
Look in this whole world of complexity one of the biggest issues is lack of predictability isn’t it? I mean there was a time when you’d do some usage and what were they called, UNA research.
Zena:
Absolutely or you’d spend three months looking at what happened last year to try and think about what you’d need to do for the following year and you would predict and that is just not the case now. You are planning and analysing and assessing and trying to predict on the run now. So, all of that we’ve written a five year plan and it’s taken us four months to write doesn’t really hold up anymore in this environment.
Darren:
Five years, you’d be lucky.
Zena:
You would be lucky. Imagine if you’d written a five-year plan five years ago that you were sticking to like glue, how far behind you would now be. Your competitors would have overtaken you. We’ve seen examples of that in the work that we do here where they’re sticking rigidly to their outlook and their plans and then they’re standing there and asking us why are we struggling with the competitors who we once use to be ahead of.
Darren:
People are still spending a lot of time money and effort trying to predict the future. We see these futurists who are almost held up in god-like awe but in actual fact there has to be a different way because if you can’t predict the future then you have to adapt to what the future brings as it reveals itself don’t you?
Zena:
Absolutely, and that’s the test, iterate, test, iterate, press repeat cycle that really needs to be what drives the planning process or the adaptability process, now let’s call it that. How adaptable can we be for the next six months and what does that look like? Is that going to help us achieve yes, maybe the long term strategic goals the company still have and should have but how do we plan to adapt?
Darren:
It’s a great word adaptability. Charles Darwin actually wrote survival of the fittest but the word fittest meant that which was best suited to the circumstances faced. So, in many ways it was which species were able to adapt to those circumstances because they had attributes that allowed that adaptation. And I think that is true in business today.
Zena:
Absolutely.
Darren:
Those that are able to adapt are more flexible, have greater resilience, are able to capitalise on the changes as they present themselves.
Zena:
Absolutely, and I think the mindset too of those who are adaptable but can also accept that what they just tried didn’t work, dust themselves off and keep going; that resilience of being able to regroup becomes stronger and they tackle the next iteration.
I think that’s important because quite often you sit in with clients and marketing teams who are too scared to try something in case it fails but you really need to try something to know if you need to adapt that approach to move forward.
Darren:
So, you’re really talking about embracing natural selection because by things dying and dying economically or whatever you’re actually going to end up with a stronger offering.
Zena:
Absolutely, and if you don’t try it you don’t know and there is nothing wrong with making mistakes in business. All the successful people will tell you that they learnt from the mistakes that they made and that is what delivered them a better product, offering, brand position.
Darren:
Exactly, but part of this is also the way organisations have been structured because we still find most organisations are structured to do business the way business was done a hundred years ago.
Zena:
Yeah, absolutely, still very much clinging on to job titles and linear positions of power.
Darren:
Hierarchies
Zena:
Hierarchies, that’s very much how businesses are comfortable to operate, even when they sit and talk to us about wanting to do things a different way. The experience I’ve had is the minute you start talking about flattening or empowering or taking away silos the hackles go up because they perceive that to be stripping away their personal power as opposed to being for the benefit of the masses within the organisation.
That is definitely something that is still continuing, this traditional way of structuring in a hierarchical manner so everybody understands their place and everything is in it’s place.
Darren:
It comes out of the idea of there’s a predictable future and so you are able to then create an organisational structure that would then allow control and efficiency on delivering on the prediction.
Zena:
And it’s human nature for people to look towards a stronger leader to make the hard decisions but the environment today in business doesn’t allow for that. Everybody needs to be able to quickly make decisions and have confidence that the decision that they’re making is going to deliver a benefit for the tribe, the brand, and the masses as opposed to just one person now who has worked their way up the vertical ladder and is deemed to be the most important person in the room.
That thinking just doesn’t hold anymore in my opinion and from what I’ve certainly been seeing with the clients that we’ve been working with.
Darren:
Especially marketing is often either centralised, and given its own silo in a way that then has to work across the organisation, or it gets fragmented into decentralised and fragmented across the silos and then suddenly you get all these bolt-on bits like where does data live and digital channels and all of that.
This very neat silo hierarchical structure suddenly has got dotted lines all over the place. It really loses a lot of the efficiency doesn’t it?
Zena:
It does and sometimes it just doesn’t make sense. They’ve tacked something onto a nice neat silo but then you ask them why did you put the social media team in corporate communications, and they look at you and go ‘I don’t know, um, because John Smith who heads up the department is good on social media’. Okay and?
Darren:
The one that cracks me up is customer data because you know it’s so valuable having customer data, why would we want to let anyone touch it? Well because that’s how they are going to actually give your customers a better experience.
Zena:
Or when you ask who does customer data report to and they say ‘that department over there’ okay well then how does this department over here access it?
Darren:
Up the chain, across, down, back up, across…
Zena:
And by the time you’ve broken down the three walls between each of those silos it’s no wonder people internally either lose the will to live or just start making up their own work-arounds. And then that’s when we often see the fun beginning – there are silos within silos or there’s centralised decentralisation so it then becomes a bigger mess.
Darren:
So, do you think this is why there is so much conversation these days about being agile and agile marketing and agile processes?
Zena:
I do. I‘ve called it a bit of a buzz word in the past and I do think it is a little bit of a buzz word but I think marketers are desperately looking for something to cling on to that’s going to make this landscape easier for them to deal with. This rapidly changing environment that they are in.
Agility is great; it obviously works in areas of innovation and creativity. It’s not necessarily for every department within a business but the thinking of what drives agile marketing or agility in business is a great thing to be happening now with the marketing landscape and for people to be looking at adopting some of those behaviours into helping them work better as a team.
Darren:
Well that’s if agility is seen as the access to being more flexible and resilient and being more adaptable to the market place but often it’s just sold as a proprietary process almost.
Zena:
Absolutely and it is not a process per say because agility needs to be reflected across the whole process from thinking, doing structure, and strategy. You need to have agility across all three areas really to be able to call yourself agile.
Otherwise you have a marketing department over here working in what they think is an agile manner but the rest of the business is working in a command and control linear manner and as soon as the agile digital marketing person is buzzing around the IT department trying to get things done super quick and they don’t work that way, that’s where the problems exacerbate and conflict internally becomes a problem.
Darren:
It is a problem because where you’ve got a very rigid siloed hierarchical structure and you try to make agility work within a silo it really doesn’t allow for adaptability does it as an organisation?
Zena:
It just can’t work. I’ve seen a recent example of a team telling me hand on heart that they work agile and they were a marketing team so there were quite a few functions sitting under marketing in a siloed manner. Absolutely looked me dead in the eye to tell me they were an agile marketing team yet no one knew what the entire business goal was, there was no transparency and they were the only team working that way. So, the minute they stepped outside their own team there was no agility.
Darren:
It went straight back to linear, up and down chain, across the silos.
Zena:
So yeah it’s more than just a process and it’s more than just take it off the shelf, plug it in and away we go, we’re agile. It’s a long process to implement.
Darren:
I think a lot of people are struggling with what that structure should be to be more agile. We’ve both read this book ‘Team of Teams’ it’s been out for a couple of years by General Stanley McCrystal (US Army retired). It’s actually quite an interesting book when it comes to the way you think about teams.
What did you get from reading it?
Zena:
Well I enjoyed that book so much I read it twice.
Darren:
And probably a third and fourth time coming.
Zena:
Yeah, it’s a really fascinating insight into an organisation shall we call it; it is the Military, which is still an organisation. An organisation clinging on to working in an antiquated linear manner in a new world, and when read from that perspective, the insight that General Stanley Mc Crystal gives on the reality check they all woke up to one day when they realised they were getting circles run around them by a rag tag army called the Taliban, El Qaeda.
In his terms, who had no structure, appeared to have multiple leaders and a network of communication that absolutely blew the US Military out of the water. It’s amazing to watch their mea culpa moment; we’re the ones doing this wrong.
Darren:
I know marketing often uses Military metaphors like ‘we mount a campaign, we have a target audience that we’re going to launch upon’ but in actual fact it was really quite interesting because he uses some historical examples of war and where there was a predictability of the way war used to be fought and now in the new complex world it is not like that at all, some people say guerrilla warfare and it’s not like that at all.
What they are up against was this complexity and also battling what often looked to them as a structured network that was creating chaos yet all they were trying to do was use data to make sense of it yet there was no sense. They were working as these cells and they could form and reform; pretty much like the market place today. They were just hopelessly antiquated and out of date.
Zena:
It was interesting and particularly when he overlaid it with the past, I think he went all the way back to Napoleon to explain his point. Here they were thinking the same way in everything, in how to mount the attack, make the decisions, delegate etc.
Whereas this seemingly dis-organised cluster of terrorists that were all over the Middle East were forming and reforming and adapting and also displaying resilience in their adaptation to continue fighting, just left them for dead, basically.
It was funny when I was reading the book; it took me back to that cartoon that use to be on in the late eighties called the Wonder Twins. One of them could form into some form of liquid or mass product and one of them could form into animal.
Whichever one they formed into was dependent on the situation they were in at that exact time and that was the first thing that came into my mind when he was describing how these terrorists could adapt.
Darren:
The ability to adapt.
Zena:
Absolutely and take shape into whatever was needed at that particular point in time. That shape may never be needed again but it was what they formed into to be able to address the situation and win what they needed to win right at that particular point.
Darren:
He was in charge of the task force in Iraq and Afghanistan. What I got out of it were some key insights about how we need to change the way we think about organisations and about the way people work together because it’s terrific on so many levels.
There’s a structural level, there’s a process, there’s even a leadership component which I found quite insightful and that is that you need to go from being the chess master to the gardener as a leader, which I loved.
The idea that the chess master is in command and moves the pieces around the board. How many war movies have you seen where they’re moving their resources in battle, to the gardener who is hands off but eyes on he says. He’s creating the environment, the ecosystem for things to flourish. I thought that from a leadership perspective that was really interesting because we do talk about leadership as the person leading the way but it’s a much more empowering view of what leadership involves.
Zena:
It is. One of my favourite comments from an old manager years and years ago was ‘the leader should always be the one standing behind’. And I think that’s sort of what he’s saying in here about you become the gardener is that you may not be standing behind but you’re actually the one that is overseeing and making sure that the environment is right for everyone to grow and achieve what they need to achieve.
Not dictating and barking orders from above in the corner mahogany office far removed from what’s actually happening on the ground.
Darren:
Or sending out missives to the troops, that this is what we’re going to do, you know, prepare men.
Zena:
I think one of the stories he said in there too was talking about the decision-making processes, that before they changed their way of operating it could sometimes take three weeks for information to go up the chain, decision to be made and come all the way back down the chain, by then the Taliban had already moved country.
Darren:
And that’s because that was the flow of information. So, the first thing he talked about was the structure, he talked about moving from that hierarchy because the task force was made up of all the three or four military plus CIA plus FBI.
Zena:
They had everyone in there.
Darren:
Everyone was in there and all operating at the highest levels. But he moved from that structure to realising he needed a network. He put in place teams, they had command of these teams that he then moved to, and where the title of the book came from was team of teams where the network was actually defining itself.
Zena:
I think the key to that was making sure there were representatives from each of the teams within teams so that there was a quick, direct connection not only to the next team but an innate understanding of what the next team was doing. I think that really is what built the strength of these teams is having that ability. It’s inter-dependency but it’s also trust because there’s somebody who understands working across all of the teams.
Darren:
He actually calls it an embedding and liaison programme.
Zena:
Yeah.
Darren:
Which is really interesting? Our experience of working with lots of different companies; everyone’s in their own little groups. Marketing is marketing, sales is sales. The idea of having people going and either liaising or embedding themselves in other teams is just fascinating.
Zena:
Absolutely, and I’m terrible with remembering the minutia of books but there was a term he used in there with regards to that and it was the teams who think they are better than, so that better than mentality. So, this team over here working in isolation in this little silo, looks over at the next team and goes ‘well we are better than them’ but then that team is looking over at the next team and going ‘well we are better than them’.
So, you are always going to have this level of animosity between teams because you think you’re in the best team. They think they’re in the best team. That happens in organisations. We see that when we go in and start interviewing across teams, this attitude of well we are better than them. It comes from the fact that they don’t understand what ‘them’ are doing. Or why ‘them’ are doing what they are doing.
Darren:
I did some work with a bank in the region and what amazed me was the product team looked down their nose at the marketing team not realising that product is actually part of marketing. But because they’d created this artificial construct of separating product out from marketing and turned marketing largely into marcomms, they actually saw themselves as separate teams. In actual fact anyone that goes by the traditional definition of marketing would realise they are both part of the same team.
Zena:
Absolutely. I’ve certainly worked in environments where I’ve ended up saying let’s call my marketing director title what it actually is shall we and it’s, I’m a marcomms director because I have no say in the product, no say in the price point, I have no say in the distribution but you would be looked at as though ha.
There is a lack of understanding at executive level that marketing is more than just as you’ve called it in the past, the colouring in department. It is critical to be across all of those facets.
In fact, working with TrinityP3 I haven’t walked into one marketing team where there isn’t a marcomms department that’s called marketing and the rest of the stuff is somewhere else in the business. But it’s marketing, it’s all marketing. If you are developing the product, who are you developing it for? How do you know what you are developing?
Darren:
And pricing.
Zena:
Exactly.
Darren:
Distribution.
Zena:
Exactly.
Darren:
I think it’s because promotion is often the highest profile aspect of marketing but just the language itself is incredibly confusing. If you start thinking about teams, especially teams in organisations where each team has some impact on the customer or consumer. What General Stanley McCrystal is actually saying is you then have the teams working together and aligned together to common purpose so they actually can adapt to deliver that customer experience.
Zena:
Absolutely and I think that’s where the mentality of agility sometimes falls down within big organisations is that sense of shared purpose because that silo over there has KPI’s around X and that silo over there has KPI’s around Y and they are not actually coming together to realise that their shared purpose is customer benefit, customer value.
It’s also P&L aligned in that you need to deliver benefits and savings to the P&L. If everybody understood that that threads through them and that shared sense of purpose that he touches on in that book.
We see that lacking a lot and causing issues because again it comes down to we’re better than that team over there because we’re delivering on this. And we’re better than that team over there because we’re delivering on Y. And in actual fact you’re not delivering on Y you’re delivering on customer value and customer benefit and driving revenue.
Darren:
It’s like the credit card team go, ‘we’re better because we manage to push out more credit card applications’ and the Home loan team go, ‘we’re better because the total value of funds is bigger’ and all of these are just very incremental components for the overall.
And yet what we’ve seen in the Banking Royal Commission is that those very focused KPIs have led to some very distorted and questionable behaviour because it’s completely out of context.
Zena:
Yeah and it’s blinkered. You’ve got your blinkers on and you can’t see what’s going on elsewhere and you certainly can’t see the impact of what you’re doing across the business.
I think the best thing that ever happened to me for my marketing career is starting my own business to understand what role every function of the business plays across the board and therefore what role marketing plays. To me, moving forward with agile marketing and being able to be adaptable and resilient there needs to be that exposure across the business for everyone.
The HR manager should know what the marketing people do–they should know their roles intimately as well as the marketing person needs to know what the engineer’s role is and what they do and know their role intimately.
That visibility needs to be common practice now so you can understand what ramifications will be felt across the entire business and the entire customer journey if I make this decision here. Which with the banks is not what happened.
Darren:
We’ve been talking a lot about the internal structure but imagine if you embraced the ideas that are in that book, ‘Team of Teams’ and actually applied that to where we started from; every stakeholder and especially between marketers and their agencies and external suppliers.
Imagine the idea of having common shared purpose, open transparency, open sharing of information, and trust; all the things that have recently been questioned and compromised. What do you think would be the result if you could achieve that?
Zena:
Better work, relationships, outcomes across the board I think. We often see, working with marketing teams, this backlash against agencies; they don’t understand, they’re not quick enough, not cheap enough, not this, not that.
And then you go and speak to the agencies and you hear from their perspective that they’re not told business objectives, budget until the 11th hour, things get changed half way through, briefs are poorly written. They don’t know the business the way they should know the business.
And some marketers (controversially I might say this) who are dealing with the agencies also don’t know their business the way they should know their business so you have this battle of half information going along—that’s poor quality work that’s going to get done by that. It’s the saying, ‘shit in, shit out’ and I think that’s across the board with marketers and agencies.
If marketers and agencies became true partners and not just used that term loosely when they’ve been awarded the pitch. If they become true partners, which means they become interdependent, there’s transparency of information, shared sense of purpose, it would go a long way to helping those relationships and deliver better work.
Darren:
And the way you engage with your agency because one team is looking at another team and saying we’re better than them. We see that a lot in rosters of agencies because the marketers will often, deliberately or not, play agencies off against each other; ‘you’re my lead agency’ which makes everyone else my following agency.
Zena:
Yes. We’ve dealt with that quite recently where there was a lead agency and the agency was being criticised for not delivering but they were the lead agency because that’s how they were engaged. But the attitude from the lead agency was ‘well, we’re the lead agency so everybody should be coming to us.’ Nothing’s going to get done; it’s a stalemate.
That’s stemmed in this command and control hierarchical, linear structure where they don’t understand that actually you’re a team with a shared sense of purpose that you’re all getting measured on, whether it’s defined or not, of delivering the best possible outcome to the customer who will then come to the brand to purchase the product or services and deliver to the bottom line.
And fundamentally, when you boil it down that’s your job. But it’s this conflict and ego-driven environment that has been encouraged by this whole hierarchy structure of the last century. It’s antiquated and it needs to go because there’s no room for it anymore.
Darren:
It’s funny isn’t it because we’ve built these structures and we’re so hesitant to let go of them. I had a conversation a couple of years ago and they said, ‘business structures come from the military—everyone knows that’ and I said, ‘the military actually got that structure from the Romans. Before the Romans the way you waged battle was you got large groups of people and they just charged each other and tried to kill as many as possible without getting killed themselves.’
It was the Romans who realised you didn’t actually have to be a good fighter if you had structure and discipline to form yourselves into legions that were much more efficient as a fighting machine.
So, something that is almost 2,000 years old is still the structure we use today in a world (to bring us back to where we started this conversation) that has become so complex, so difficult to predict the future even a couple of weeks ahead sometimes—it’s interesting isn’t it?
Zena:
That hierarchical structure where people cling on to their positions of power as they move up the ladder (I hate that term).
Darren:
I prefer climbing the greasy pole.
Zena:
And this isn’t the case with everybody that works within these structures but it’s certainly been a common experience of mine that you’ll see decisions getting made for the benefit of the person as opposed to the benefit of the business or the customer because they’re trying to get brownie points to then be able to climb further up the greasy pole.
That doesn’t work in this new environment. It’s got to be fast-paced decision-making to allow for adaptability and flexibility across structure, process, and strategy to be able to better position your business to your customers.
Darren:
And ultimately it’s the results that count.
Zena:
Exactly.
Darren:
In a holistic approach not just in very narrow KPIs.
Zena:
Exactly and again this goes back to people understanding the role they play within the broader business. Everybody should understand the impact on the bottom line of the decisions they’re making and they don’t (in my experience).
Darren:
So actually, build the ‘Team of Teams’.
Zena:
Absolutely.
Darren:
We’ve run out of time, Zena but thank you.
Zena:
Thank you.
Darren:
It’s been a great conversation but I’ve got one last question and that is; of all the companies we’ve worked with recently are any of them doing it really well?
Changes in marketing strategy require new, more effective structures for delivering that strategy. Find out how TrinityP3 can help here