Kieran Antill is the Director of Brand and Marketing at Ne-Lo, and Ross Hastings is the Managing Director. Their agency, Ne-Lo, has its foundation in a gym of all places, where two people with wildly different backgrounds and perspectives, yet with a shared fascination with the challenges of modern business, met.
Kieren, who was heading up the creative team at the late JWT and was at a point of exasperated disillusionment with the way agency business models stifled innovation and marginalised creativity.
Ross, an expert in the role of psychology in organisational leadership and culture, who was consulting and coaching executive teams and was frustrated by the lack of creativity in strategy and culture change.
Both were expecting their first-born daughters, a handy catalyst to address these frustrations and build something they were proud to tell their daughters about. So, in 2018, Ne-Lo was born, and soon after, The Anatomy of Marketing.
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Because of marketing’s bad brand, if we say you are all in marketing, as you mentioned, a lot of people will say, “No, I’m bloody not.” And probably the marketer will go, that’s my job.
Transcription:
Darren:
Hi, I’m Darren Woolley, founder, and CEO of TrinityP3 Marketing Management Consultancy, and welcome to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners.
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Some will argue there are now more agencies than we actually need, but what if you tried to come up with a new agency model to address the issues with the current models?
This agency has its foundation in a gym of all places, with two people with wildly different backgrounds and perspectives, yet with a shared fascination with the challenges of modern business.
One was one of the world’s most awarded creatives, a former executive creative director at Leo Burnett, New York, who was heading up the creative teams at the late JWT and was at a point of exasperation, disillusionment with the way agency business models stifled innovation and marginalized creativity.
The other, an expert in the role of psychology and organizational leadership and culture, who was consulting and coaching with executive teams, and was frustrated with the lack of creativity in strategy and cultural change.
Both were expecting their firstborn daughters, a handy catalyst to do something about these frustrations and build something they were proud to tell their daughters about. So, in 2018, Ne-Lo was born and shortly after, so were Neve-Ne, and Lottie-Lo.
Please welcome to Managing Marketing Podcast, Director of Brand and Marketing at Ne-Lo, Kieran Antill. Hi, Kieran.
Kieran:
Hey, Darren. Thanks for having us on.
Darren:
And Ne-Lo Managing Director, Ross Hastings. Welcome, Ross.
Ross:
Thanks, Darren. Great to be here.
Darren:
I’m sorry if you are a little uncomfortable me sharing your origin story, but I have to say, so few agencies actually share a really interesting origin story, which is why I want to do it. Because I think we talk about storytelling, but rarely use it for our own businesses. So, first of all, well done.
Ross:
Thank you. I think as you rightly said earlier, there’s probably more agencies than there need to be. So, we’ve always had this view of, “Why are we doing this? What’s the reason?” And part of that’s clearly the story.
Darren:
One of the things that I would like is to get a very clear view of what Ne-Lo is about. What do you do?
Because when I looked at the website, and clearly, I was where I found the origin story, when I got to the section about what you do, there was lists of things, which I find often commoditizes what you do as an agency because you end up listing the pigeonhole categories. So, who wants to take on the challenge of giving me a distinctive description of what you’re doing?
Ross:
I might kick off and Kieran feel free to build, but you’ve got to play the game right. I think sometimes you’ve got to say the things that you think are on people’s lips or in their eyes when they’re searching for something.
But ultimately at a high level, we call ourselves a business design consultancy, as you would’ve seen. And the reason for that is while we specialize in marketing and brand, we have a view of the world that marketing in the modern business transcends the marketing department.
So, it sits across multiple areas of the business. It’s more than just promotions if we just take a view of the four Ps. Decisions around those Ps are being made all over a business.
So, we really take the view of working alongside an executive team to understand where the marketing happens in their business to navigate that, and to be able to invest time and resources in the areas that are going to have the most impact on their brand, which we define as the reputation of their business. And all of that combines back up to what the aspirations of the goals of the business are.
So, if that’s growth, then what are the levers we can pull, the investments we can make to drive that growth. If that goal is something else, then obviously it changed the conversation, but it’s very much working with executive teams to take a holistic view of marketing that transcends the traditional marketing department.
Darren:
Kieran, where does creativity fit into this role or mission that you have?
Kieran:
Well, I think creativity, you mentioned pigeonholes, like a lot of things we will talk about on this, I’m sure about just common language is in advertising we say this creative, in fact we say a creative department and in an advertising agency, like, “Please stop doing that.”
You’re in a creative business, so everyone should be creative, but also whether you are on the client side, who the hell is trying to hire non-creative people?
So, the principles of creativity probably comes back to first understanding what does that word mean for people. I think a business innovation is probably the same example. How are we being innovative? How are we doing lateral problem solving?
And I think that all good agencies regardless of their area of expertise do think that way, but they don’t necessarily act that way, and they certainly don’t hire that way. So, it’s fair to say that we do attach the idea of creativity to things that are more visual or artistic and output.
And therefore, sometimes we think, “Oh, that doesn’t have a place in business.” But all the leading business minds definitely reject that idea and say, “The greatest CEOs are incredibly creative.” So, where does creativity have a role? In every great business.
Darren:
And in every part of every business too.
Kieran:
Yeah, absolutely.
Darren:
But I think even people often think of procurement and finances quite boring, but there’s even creative thinking in those areas. But you do have to be careful with creative accounting. I’ve heard that that can lead you into trouble.
Kieran:
You do. But my favorite CFOs or even data analysts, you see that excitement. They geek on the numbers and they say things like, “The numbers tell the story.” And they’re also saying that we can put these numbers in whichever order is going to tell the story you want to tell. That’s, I guess, their understanding.
But it’s also being mindful of things like finances and data to say, “Take them on their face value,” to say, “Oh, that’s the answer.” Well, if we turn the graph sideways it’s a very different story.
Ross:
I also think when it comes to finance, this comes into the creative point as well, there’s real challenge we’ve got in leadership executive space at the moment, it’s heavily reliant on analytical thinking and looking at the past for evidence of what’s going to work in the future.
And perhaps there’s a case to be made for really creative approach to strategic finance could support more creative thinking in the business if we can understand how we might start up with a hypothesis as a way of moving forward with an innovative way of thinking or a new innovative idea in our business.
And start off with a hypothesis, think about how are we going to test it and allow that creativity to come through. It requires really creative approach to finance, perhaps a really creatively minded CFO to back that sort of idea and not ask for that evidence of future ROI.
Darren:
It’s very hard to create the future by constantly replaying the past, isn’t it? And just going back to something you just mentioned Kieran, I’ve heard it so many times from data scientists and analysts and they say, “We can tell the story with the data.” The trouble is we need a common language, don’t we?
Because a lot of people are attracted into business and marketing in particular because they don’t like maths, and yet the language of data is mathematics. And it’s one of the few languages that is universal, music being the other one. But there is an issue, isn’t there, with finding a common language if we’re going to bring people together.
Kieran:
Yeah. I think that’s something, that term common language is across everything. And I guess it definitely is — I mean, to your point about the numbers, they appear to be more accurate. There’s decimal places, it must be accurate. I mean, we had to go to the fractional level to explain it. And that’s what is difficult in creativity to sometimes say why this is 0.04% better than the other thing.
And it appears subjective. Where we try and put things in there is understand if we are objective of what we’re trying to achieve, we can start being far more accurate in, is this creative direction correct? Is this strategy correct?
Because what response are we trying to actually achieve? So, in this area of things like design, yes, people say that’s beautiful design, but if you’re trying to make the brand not feel super expensive and super premium, then this design is completely the wrong area.
And so, it’s sort of having those things, connecting how those things work together and we’ll get more into now as well. But things like marketing and brand, what do we mean by those?
Darren:
So, probably a good way of bringing this to life to people. Ross, I’ll start with you. How do clients approach you at Ne-Lo? What are the typical opening conversations like, and where do you take them in solving the challenges that they’ve brought to you?
Ross:
Well, there’s probably two parts to that answer. We’ve always been about taking a holistic approach to marketing and brand building across a business. So, it’s always been really important that we establish kind of alignment and buy-in around that from early on in the engagement.
So, often we get engaged around a moment in time need, like a rebrand or perhaps there’s been a new acquisition and they’re bringing a new brand or a new business into the group, so it’s kind of a brand architecture conversation.
Quite often it’s about understanding the customer better and rethinking a value proposition or something like that around that. So, it often starts with a kind of a definitive need like that. But regardless of the starting point to stay true to our value prop, it’s always been really important to build alignment at the start.
Which brings us onto your common language point because what we realized in the early days of Ne-Lo is that to be able to do this effectively and efficiently, we needed to be able to bring some level of common language and common understanding or common blueprint to drive those conversations because that buy-in and alignment piece was critical.
So, I know we’ll talk more about this later on, but that led us to develop a model in methodology internally to deliver that common language and that became the Anatomy of Marketing.
So, these days, to start off the engagement, we effectively take the kind of high-level need, but then we explore the underlying problem in a bit more detail through the lens of the Anatomy of Marketing.
So, we’ll generally get an executive team together, we’ll explore the original, let’s call it brief, but for us, it’s usually kind of a problem or a need that they’re trying to solve. We’ll explore that through the Anatomy of Marketing.
So, we’re actually getting different perspectives on the team in terms of, “Oh yeah, no, I think this is actually the thing that we need, or we need that thing, but we should probably do it in this order.” Or “Actually, you’re right, we are missing that piece, we should probably start there.”
So, that allows us to really dive into the root cause, not only get deeper and more clear on the problem that actually needs to be solved, but do so in a way that aligns a team around that and builds buy-in across an executive team and ultimately across the business.
Darren:
So, when are they engaged? Because a lot of marketers come to us when they’ll say, “Well, I’m looking for a …” and then they’ll describe some sort of supplier, an agency with a set of skill sets. How does it differ with the way that — if someone came to you and said, “Well, we we’re looking for a creative agency to come up with an advertising campaign,” how would that conversation go?
Ross:
We’d probably be starting with why? Why is the answer an ad in this case? It might be. But I know, Kieran, maybe you want to build on this, but Kieran has some, it’s really interesting ideas on the briefing process and what an agency’s role, or particularly what we think our role should be if we get a brief around an ad.
Kieran:
I mean, I think every agency should be striving to exist before the brief which is why are we doing this? And is the answer. And I think that we’re all talking about that idea of luck. We can come up with apply, the creative thinking and the creative minds that we have to, to things like product innovation and things like that. And that’s true to a point.
If you haven’t hired people that work in that area, then if you’re not really doing that, and if you’ve been engaged by the CMO and the CMO is not in charge of those things, then you’re talking to the wrong person.
So, I think where and when the conversation starts with us is generally, as we’ve already touched on here, which is common language. It’s just like, “Okay, what is it that you want? So, you said you want a marketing campaign. What does that mean? What does it mean to you?” It’s not about saying this is what it has to mean. It’s saying, what does it mean to you and let’s unpack that a little bit.
So, if it turns out it’s this promotion, that’s great. But if we’re all being open, authentic collaborative and working together, we should be going, okay, “You want a promotion? Well, hang on. Can’t help but notice this product is terrible.” You know what I mean? Like it should be fine.
Darren:
You mean you have the ability to tell someone their baby’s ugly?
Kieran:
Yeah. Well, I guess you try and lead people to that area, but of course-
Darren:
So, you say they’re breathtaking to use a Seinfeld reference.
Kieran:
Yes, yes, yes. I think Elaine was offended by that. And you’ve definitely taken me off track there, but-
Darren:
Sorry, but look what I’m understanding in the conversation is in some ways Ross, you mentioned this Anatomy of Marketing. Is the Anatomy of Marketing the common language that you’ve been talking about. Does the Anatomy of Marketing give the marketing department, for instance, a framework that can then be used to help align the organization?
Because there’s a famous quote that says, “Innovation and marketing are the only two functions of business that drive value. Everything’s just an execution.” And yet most businesses are far more driven by operations and finance than they are by innovation and marketing.
Ross:
Absolutely. So, yes, it is the common language to drive that. But we somewhat push back these days on it being about the marketing department. If we do want to look at the four Ps in modern business, arguably the marketing department often is just the promotions department.
So, if we really want to look at that full scope of marketing, and we would define marketing at Ne-Lo as any decision made anywhere in the business that impacts the customer in any way, that’s quite broad.
So, from early on, we want that common language to be something for the business to rally around, not necessarily something for the marketing department to own and try and bring along the business on the journey to pretty slight nuance.
And I think I’ve heard you say Darren before that one of the biggest mistakes you see businesses make is thinking that marketing is just promotions. And we often see businesses that think that is just a small subset of promotions to take it even further. So, we try and navigate that, but that also determines somewhat who our target customer is.
Because to your point, there’s some businesses that is just probably banging your head up against the wall to try and get them to align with our view on the world.
But generally speaking, we have this notional term of marketing organizations, which is any business that’s in arguably kind of most post-industrial businesses that are in competitive environment are going to win by the value they create for their customers across their customer service, across their product, across their comms, across their sales process.
We probably wouldn’t be trying to say that our approach is right for a heavily industrial business, for example, but we do like to talk about Amazon. So, to your point, heavily focused on ops and innovation around supply chain, things like that, but always obsessively to pass the value onto the customer as opposed to just shape the bottom line, I think that’s the distinction for us.
Darren:
Kieran, it must have been quite a frustrating situation. Because one of the issues with the traditional agency model, particularly network agencies, is that it seems to have become much more about bringing clients in and maximizing the extraction rate of how much of their budget you keep and therefore only putting up solutions that will to further that in to make the shareholders of the holding companies better off. Is this quite a radical change then from where you were?
Kieran:
Look, I generally kind of think we’re not doing anything controversial. I should probably say we’re doing these radical things so different. I think we’re doing what everyone says that they want to do, which they don’t actually act that way. They don’t follow through in doing that.
So, my network experience was, “Oh, we are now about innovation. Well, okay, really, what did we change? Or we’re now doing product design. Okay, did we hire any … did we do anything different? No, we’re just going to say that we’re doing these things now.”
So, it’s this sort of wanting to change, but not actually looking at the business model and knowing that the core of a lot of those network offices is burn and churn kind of stuff. So, we’re going to see, particularly with AI, a lot of that stuff being whipped away because you’ve got head count because you’re just producing so much stuff. So, I think that there’s a willingness and then a want.
So, I don’t think when we are talking about this, anyone’s like, “That’s completely ridiculous.” And in fact, the anatomyofmarketing.org, which is where anyone can see everything, we’re sort of talking about on this.
We are really kind of laying this out in a way that it’s not our view. It’s not what Ne-Lo only deliver. We coach and advise across the whole thing to try and help clients understand where to place their emphasis. So, it’s really a conversation around that.
And it’s at the core of the workshops we do with clients, getting multiple departments working together and all determining where they need to be placing that priority. So, the priorities may, for instance, be in PR say, “Look, you’re really soft in the PR,” we are not a PR agency, but we’d be saying, “This is where you are really kind of weak.”
And again, with the visual, if you’re looking at the website, we use a color-coding system and what we’d be saying is a lot of agencies, a lot of clients do brief in the blue, the blue is the execution strategy. So, they’re basically, I’m in an agency to do me a website but a website’s a bucket. It’s a bucket of stuff, particularly any corporate website.
Well, so this is where a lot of digital agencies find themselves in that scenario where they’re building their website, but it wasn’t about us or a purpose. So, “Oh, well we should probably do that as well.” So, they do those things, or maybe they’re like, “Let’s add their values. Well, we haven’t done our values, so let’s do our values.”
Well, things like developing purpose and developing values are really much more up in company strategy. And yes, they’re going to exist on your website, something you have to execute and put out there, but projects about company values are much more about remuneration structures and hiring.
So, why are you doing that with your digital agency? Unless, of course they have built themself in a way that allows them to do that. So, it’s understanding that just because you can do something, we need to sort of say, “I need to wear a different hat. This project is adding value where in the business.”
And that’s really what we’re trying to map out here, is how do all these wonderful clever things that so many people around the world have contributed to, how do they actually work together? And I’d like to say if we could contribute anything, it’s purely just the organization of that.
And we’re at the point where we’re trying to be as abundant as we can to share. And maybe Ross can continue on with this, but this is the beginning of this is the Anatomy of Marketing, how do things all work together, version one. We want to kind of build, there’ll be version two to really hopefully have that universal view.
Darren:
I completely understand where you’re trying to go. I just see in the same way as telling a creative department in an agency, that creativity actually exists across the whole organization. Telling a marketer that marketing actually doesn’t exist, the responsibility doesn’t exist in the marketing department, it’s actually an organizational challenge, has its challenges.
People in large organizations naturally get put into silos with each silo given its responsibility. And now you’re saying, “God forbid, collaborate with everyone else because that’s the way it should work.”
I mean, logically it should work. But Ross, you’ve got quite a lot of experience in organizational psychology, people are inclined to become territorial, aren’t they?
Ross:
They absolutely are. But at the same time, they’ll turn the other way and then complain that they’re not getting buy-in for their approach to marketing within the business. So, it’s-
Darren:
Of course, because they think they’re the only ones that know what to do properly.
Ross:
Exactly. And that it does require a mindset shift. I mean, we sometimes talk about the best way for most businesses to move forward is for the CMO to recognize that they’re actually the chief promotions officer and pricing-
Darren:
The coloring in department, let’s … I mean, every time I speak to a CEO or managing director or COO and they go, “Oh, the coloring in department,” I go, “I don’t know why we’re here.”
Ross:
Well, but the thing is, I mean, in a large organization, if the marketing department recognized, we are actually just promotions, product has grown, particularly tech businesses is outgrowing in the marketing department, it’s got a department of its own right, pricing’s probably made some analyst team in the finance department. And that brings its own problems if they don’t see themselves as marketers.
And obviously place distribution like departments in their own right and in large organizations often. But that’s not to say that seeing a department as a promotions department is diminishing what they do at all.
It’s just calling it what it is and there is a little bit of all this stuff, there’s common talk, now it’s a little bit of a safe space as an executive team. It’s a little bit about bringing vulnerability and it’s a bit like it is moving through that kind of defensiveness and siloed ownership.
And that’s a bigger conversation that’s about leadership, that’s about aligning incentives and things like that, which I can go into.
But ultimately, I think that calling a marketing department, promotions department is not diminishing what they do. That’s, as we all know, still a massive hairy problem to solve promotions is huge multi-billion-dollar industry in its own right. But coming to that exec alignment, the biggest challenge I see in executive teams is that they’re generally only teams by name.
They’re actually just a kind of a committee or a group that comes together regularly, shares some retrospective, updates on what they’ve been doing plays bit of a political game, kind of works on their kind of self-brand then goes back to their own team, which is the department they lead up. And that’s actually a true team because they have aligned incentives, aligned goals, et cetera, et cetera.
So, if more executive teams can actually start to structure themselves as teams have team goals as opposed to individual incentives, actually prioritize across the team on where the best focus is towards those goals, then we’ll start to get to a position where what we’re talking about is probably more feasible, like large scale.
Because to your point, Darren, at the moment, almost every executive team you walk into, they’re going to have individual incentives tied to the remuneration, which are around the performance of their individual department. So, of course, they’re going to focus on that.
They’re going to have individual goals, individual targets. They’re fighting for allocation of budget to work towards those goals as opposed to, here’s one goal, here’s one direction, incentive being based on team performance, at least partially.
And let’s have a conversation about how we’re going to prioritize across the business to allocate that budget and to work towards the objectives of the business. And to give a specific example, and Kieran kind of alluded to this earlier, we got brought in a couple of years back, a listed company to do a brand campaign.
But in working through like the RG early stages of the project, we realized that the onboarding process dropped about 70% of the customers that went into it. So, the conversation became, “Why are we investing in reducing cost of acquisition over here and driving people into a leaky bucket?”
When we could turn around as a team and say, “Well, let’s fix that and let’s use marketing resources and budget for that too. Let’s get that really tight. And then, rather than the product team having another budget next year, let’s take the product budget next year and move it into marketing and acquisition drive into a really robust funnel.”
And that business was of the nature that was able to somewhat move towards that view of the world. They still had capital markets, did shareholders, they stood up, still had all that sort of stuff. So, it was tricky to fully move there, but I think the philosophy was, it was right.
And like all these things, it’s not binary. There are ways to move towards that way of thinking without jumping both feet in.
Darren:
It can be an evolution, not a revolution. But Ross, it definitely sounds like much more a top-down approach than a bottom-up approach. Is that fair to say?
Ross:
I’d say it needs to be both. It needs to be top down. Because if you want to take a holistic view of anything, I think the smallest point at which to do that is the top. You might have eight people at the top and 2000 at the bottom.
So, building alignment from the top and decisions at the top is critical, but that needs to be informed at all times by insight, input, contribution, feedback from the bottom. It can’t be done in sealed room. It can’t be done in isolation.
And particularly when it comes to things like purpose, values, culture, even brand to some degree, we kind of have the philosophy that those things exist. Business is a living system, those things aren’t created. They exist and you need to understand what they are and start from there in terms of making change.
Not starting with a closed room of executives in an offsite, making decisions in complete isolation of what the reality is in their business. And you see that mistake made with purpose, with strategy, with whatever it’s created as opposed to clarified.
Darren:
It is interesting that when you think about the sort of global brands, the Apples, the Amazons, the Virgin, they’ve all got the founder who has a very clear articulation of this exact philosophy that anything that impacts the customer is the thing that the business needs to be solving.
Is it almost like for a business that’s lost that or never had that sort of found a vision, the Anatomy of Marketing is probably a good way of starting to bring that to the organization.
Ross:
I might just quit. I’ve got a very quick one on this, Kieran, then I’ll let you talk because I’ve talked way too much. But it’s actually probably more often. So yes, if you had a leader-
Darren:
The short answer was yes.
Ross:
If you had an influential leader who was looking to really drive change in that organization, yes, the Anatomy of Marketing could be the answer.
I’d say it’s more often the answer when you have the strong founder or strong founding team and the business is growing and they’re saying, “Okay, well we really need to start to codify us and this to get it ready for scale.”
Because at some point we’re going to be removed from the customer. We’re going to have silos; we’re going to have other perspectives in our business. We need to codify this, systematize it, ready for scale. It’s probably more often at the moment the use case for the Anatomy of Marketing.
Kieran:
And I think that’s the pragmatist in us that we sort of pointing out, these are all these things you still have to go, “Okay, where is this organization at? And therefore, what is it that we are working on?” It’s not everyone needs to be perfectly aligned before we can do anything, but it’s acknowledging sometimes where are we at as an organization.
And you’re absolutely right when a founder comes in and grows the company. So, while we focus on sort of mid to larger organizations, when we do work with startups that are funded, they’re a pleasure to work with because you’re not trying to unpick these things.
They’re just like, “Yeah, we want to get at it and helps them understand how they need to support each other.” But to give you an example, on the weekend I was a guest lecturer at Sydney University Business School. And there’s about 50 people in that class.
And at the beginning, I was talking about the Anatomy of Marketing and at the beginning I sort of said, “Who here is in marketing?” And I had about two out of 50 hands. And then we went through the exercise and they explained different things.
Oh, well by the way, I also asked “Who here is an organization that we are marketing they think is incredibly important?” And a good portion of the class was there. So, they’re not in marketing, they recognize that marketing has a role.
And then we went through the exercise and three different things and went through the definition Ross had mentioned, which is first of all got their definitions and showed how different everyone was. But by the end of that, then I asked, “Okay, so who here’s in marketing?” And you had like 75% of the class.
So, the reason is that someone’s in ops, they’re in that department and they go, “Well, I’m not in marketing,” because they have the departmental mindset. The phrase that we generally work towards, which is the idea of marketing is not a department, it’s a culture, most people go, “I get it.”
It’s not about who owns what, it’s about we’re all working for this company, company definition of a company is group of people, and we all can make our marketing efforts great.
So, if you want to know what the marketing ROI is the chief marketing officer (and I don’t care if that’s the title, it doesn’t matter what it is), isn’t necessarily responsible for the entire return on investment for marketing.
Because if you’re pushing a product that could be better, though the return on investment will be less from the promotional area, and if the pricing is off, then things will be off. So, as a collective exec team, you need to be making those decisions.
And to add one more story into that P.T. Barnum, the Greatest Showman on Earth sort of famously took all these elephants and animals and everything to Manhattan, and there’s sort of two main ports that they could have landed at sort of North Port and the South Port.
An ops question, moving the animals, I mean, how much they’re going to eat, how far do they have to go, how tired are they, the costs, all those things. And famously he took the port that was furthest away from the circus and took them across the Brooklyn Bridge.
That was both to highlight how strong the Brooklyn Bridge was, but also as he said, in an ops decision, “Everyone knew the circus was in town.” So, if you made the decision in ops area, you’d basically say, “Oh, well done. We saved all this money.”
What you didn’t realize, you left huge amounts of promotional value on the table. So, the danger of businesses saying you are in marketing and I’m in ops, is not recognizing that the customer doesn’t give a crap. The customer just experiences your brand.
Darren:
Do you think what you’re describing there Kieran, is exactly why we’ve seen a trend over the last five years of dropping the CMO title and going for chief growth officer or chief customer officer or the like, to sort of distance from marketing, create a distance from the word marketing, but also to create a better reflection of the demands of that role.
Because we have seen marketers being given the responsibility for the customer experience. CX is on the rise in most organizations, yet they have the responsibility, but rarely have the authority to make the changes that are needed to improve customer experience.
Kieran:
I think there’s all those signals, aren’t they? That people are trying to. That’s what I’m saying. I don’t think we’re articulating anything that people are like, “That’s nonsense.” I think it’s actually like how do we get there?
And I think we are picking the battle of saying, “What is marketing if it’s not these four Ps? If we want to redefine it but these four Ps have been pretty stable. And again, 7 Ps, 8 Ps, 12 Ps, 42 Ps.
Darren:
I was about to say, you say four Ps, and someone comes out to left field and goes, “Well, what about the other three you’ve left on the table and I’ve got 13.” And you go, “Well go and pitch somewhere else.”
Kieran:
I think at this point we step aside for someone like a Mark Ritson and say, “Look, if you want to defend the four Ps, I think you make plenty of sense in doing so. I think that you want to extrapolate it out to more, I think you’re explaining the same thing within the four, but either way, it’s only getting bigger and in the Ps themselves are getting more complicated. So, I think that’s what we’re trying to see.
Marketing ironically has a bad brand. So, when we mention marketing everyone’s all like, so where we’ve said, “Do we call it the Anatomy of Marketing, where we should be calling it something else?” But we’re like, “Well, we don’t want to add to the noise.” We want to say, “What is that?”
But I think the better way if we’re standing in front of a whole company and we’re working with them, is to really say, we need to be a customer-centric organization. This is really what marketing is all about.
Because of marketing’s bad brand, if we say you are all in marketing, as you mentioned, a lot of people will say, “No, I’m bloody not.” And probably the marketer will go, that’s my job. So, I do think really what we’re talking about here is customer centricity overall.
Darren:
There was a time it was called the advertising department or the promotions department, but along the way, no one wanted to work in advertising. So, it became the marketing department. It’s interesting, isn’t it just the same you want-
Ross:
Maybe we’re ready for the next evolution of that, I think this time.
Darren:
I still think the fact that creative agent or agencies have creative departments and won’t let go of them is indicative of how big a challenge this could be.
Ross:
I mean, again, another rabbit hole, but you go down, but I mean, if your strategy’s not creative and your creative isn’t strategic, then you’re in all sorts of trouble. So, why are you separating those things?
Darren:
Exactly.
Kieran:
That’s just why I remember one thing we are doing, we’re talking to a number of clients, and like I said, we’re working with different educational institutions, the Berlin schooling creative leadership and also in conversation with the marketing academy. So, hopefully we’ll be doing something with them in the near future.
But we’re also talking to different ad agencies, and part of that is, that’s been my background, and we still very much do advertise it as part of what we deliver and do things. So, really what we’re trying to say, it’s not about Ne-Lo. We want to have other agencies going, “Look, what could you do better? And how does this work, how does it work?”
But ironically, I don’t see too many agencies that have a good understanding of marketing, especially in the creative department. Their ex doesn’t mean that what they’re doing is not great. They’re not very clever what they’re doing, but they don’t necessarily understand their audience and how weird is that?
Their audience is someone their client needs to, has all these marketing challenges, and therefore you get terms like advertising wankers because you rock up and you actually kick yourself in the head with the things that you say.
And I have to say, I’ve been there, I reflected on meetings I’ve been in, and I thought, “Oh, I probably did not have a full context or understanding of really what’s happening within this organization.” But that’s because we are all only sort of coming with our own experiences.
Darren:
I do see the siloed approach within organizations being a big challenge. And one of the reasons is you would’ve heard of paid, owned, earned, and shared media. And yet when I talk to large organizations, I’ll find myself talking to the person responsible for paid media investment.
And when I say, “Well, how do you integrate that with your owned, earned, and shared, oh, well, there are other people within the organization and my KPIs.” So, cultural change is a huge part of this process, isn’t it?
Ross:
Yes.
Darren:
Yes. And there are lots of people out there, consultants that say they’re all about change management and marketing transformation of … you see so many of them on LinkedIn that are all changing the world. What’s the secret ingredient that you’re bringing with the Anatomy of Marketing?
Ross:
It’s really interesting. Caught up this morning, Kieran said, “Darren’s going to ask about change management.” And I said, “Well, it’s always an interesting topic because like marketing, it means something and you say change management, and everyone goes down the route of big consultancies, digital transformation, things like that. “
So, we are not in that space. But I think a lot of the same principles apply, which is you have to get to the root of what the change means from a positive perspective for the people that the change are happening to. So, you’ve got to understand how it’s going to help them.
And that’s probably not kind of a blanket approach, but I guess the way that we are positioning the Anatomy of Marketing is in terms of creating that burning platform for change, which is a term used a lot, is that marketing is broken. The marketing does have a brand problem in many senses.
So, I would say that we talked about common language earlier, and in all the great examples of common language it supports a really high-performance culture where everybody gets real meaning from what they do. They feel part of a collective, they’re working towards something that matters to them.
I feel that marketing, generally speaking, has created a bit of a divisive defensive world where everybody has uses their own lingo or their own language, and they use that as a bit of a barrier around them that could be around, “I’m paid, not earned, et cetera, et cetera.”
But it’s also, I’m GTM and I’m whatever. It’s a world of creating these silos through the language we create. And the problem with that is that we’re not necessarily driving innovation together. We’re not moving in the same direction. We’re not moving as a common culture towards a kind of shared goal.
So, I don’t know the specific answer to your paid media people, but I expect any organization where the language is that kind of siloed and defensive is probably one of the 70% of organizations where people are pretty disillusioned and pretty kind of unsatisfied at work.
So, it’s a sensitive subject to get into, but I would say that’s at the root of change is do you want to be part of something where you get real meaning, where you’re working together with the people next to you towards something that matters to you?
Well, to do that, we need to have a blueprint, a framework, and a language to work together on something rather than just try and defend our own little plot.
Darren:
Look, I have to say Trinity P3 benefits a lot from change management projects because invariably we brought in afterwards to put it all back together again. It’s not enough to just give us a organizational chart and a Gantt chart for transformation timelines and then walk away. It’s actually about aligning people and culture to the strategy and the structure.
Ross:
Exactly, and that’s the key. It’s getting to the root of what actually matters to the people in that business and using that as the driver for change as opposed to some blanket yeah, like you said, Gantt chart or program process.
Darren:
So, there is a website where people can check out in more detail the Anatomy of Marketing approach isn’t there? And that is an anatomyofmarketing.org.
Ross:
Darren:
The anatomyofmarketing.org. Excellent. Look, we’ve run out of time. It’s been a great conversation. Thank you, Ross Hastings, and Kieran Antill.
Kieran:
Thank you, Darren.
Darren:
It’s been a great conversation.
Kieran:
We’ve really enjoyed it.
Darren:
One question before you go is, when you look around the various brands and businesses, particularly in Australia, do you think anyone is doing it particularly well?