As a marketer, don’t you love it when someone in finance or operations (or even a neighbor) asks, “What is it you do again?”
A lot (in fact most) of effective modern marketing is about reducing the perception of risk around the purchase of a product or service. Now marketers are being called on to reduce the risk associated with the business impact of their work in a way they haven’t before. That’s really what the hubbub around R.O.I. is about.
We talk a lot about return in this business now, but very little about the associated risk. Risk and return are inextricably linked. Many of us are hurting because we don’t sufficiently address the most acute pain of all. If we don’t acknowledge risk, we’re only looking at half a world. The half any CFO is most interested in.
In a famous, Nobel award winning (and I think historical) experiment, people demonstrated that they are twice as afraid of losing something, as they are optimistic about gaining something. It seems the fear of loss, as an emotion, is twice as strong as faith in gain.
So let’s skip the Wanamaker quote and focus on reducing fear, uncertainly and doubt–or in a word–risk (more on this here).
The fear, uncertainty and doubt dilemma
Your sales manager is rolling her eyes right now. Reduce fear? She knows that fear is critical in the sales process. If she’s smart, she’ll use “fear of loss” as one of her most powerful tools to communicate value to her prospect.
When used effectively, fear is pitted against itself–like fighting fire with fire. Sometimes, you need an explosive to put out a raging oil fire. So, when defining and defending your business case, you have to demonstrate that the loss associated with not deploying your offering is twice as likely as the loss associated with doing nothing.
Ahh–doing nothing. Kinda sounds good in the summertime, doesn’t it? For marketers-B2B or B2C–stasis is the enemy. Right now, doing nothing seems safe to your prospect. You know how tight your CFO is. Stasis is also at the root of our economic malaise. Fear is a great motivator and a great manipulator. So, it may be a useful tool, but it’s not a solution. When in doubt, people simply freeze in fear.
Ultimately, marketing will reduce fear in the prospect, or it will fail. So while messaging and sales tactics may leverage fear, ultimately, to succeed marketers still have to do two things: demonstrate safety and engender trust around what they propose. These goals demand great customer relationships and credible messaging.
Process drives customer relationships
To fulfill the strategies of great customer relationships and credible messaging, you must deploy standardized process, testing procedures and metrics to advance quality and reliability around your marketing initiatives. This means documenting the process and financial impact of what you propose and then review the accuracy of that documentation while the process is under way and then again after it is completed.
This is true regardless of the size of your enterprise. CRM isn’t a technology–it’s a process. CRM applications, when fully and properly implemented, can enable efficient customer relationships, but software is a means to an end and not an end in itself. CRM software applications don’t get effectively deployed when there is no process in place to drive them.
Every going concern must have a customer relationship policy and process- one that can be continually measured and improved. If you are not measuring and improving customer relationships, you are not marketing. Make yourself a better marketer right now by answering these two questions:
Are your customer relationship policies and processes documented? Can you measure the business or financial impact of your current efforts?
Current business conditions demand that marketers document and measure our work in quantitative ways so that our work can be better understood by the entire organization. We can lower the perceived risk around marketing by making it transparent to everyone.
Embracing fragmentation reduces messaging risk
As for credible messaging, you must embrace fragmentation. Love it. It really is a beautiful world out there. Think of your fragmented market as a set of tribes. You must learn all their languages and the means by which they use them. You must sound like them, look like them, laugh like them, and enjoy the things they enjoy. In short–you must validate your tribes’ identities.
Validation of common cultural or business values reduces risk for your prospect. Leveraging lifestyle is only the beginning. Drill really deep into your constituencies, leverage similarities, and avoid the vain (not to mention expensive) tendency to go wide with an offering. You must understand and communicate how your offering improves individuals and the tribes they occupy. That knowledge comes from research–of which there are innumerable methodologies and tactics.
You’ll know which method is best by looking at the fragments (or tribes) that make up your customer base. Remember: building hypothesis is integral to the scientific method and requires strong instinct and creativity. Generating concepts for test is the point at which the creative marketing arts are most important.
The old agency model: no accountable risk reduction
If all this reads droolingly obvious–you’re probably not working for an agency. CPMs don’t measure business impact. It is not enough to simply reach a dubiously measured audience. Further, documentation of marketing process is not Standard Operating Procedure at the traditional agency. Documentation actually works against the agency’s old business model: If an agency documents how they do stuff–there’s risk the client might not no longer need them.
Finally, only the largest agencies with advanced technical arms are adding value on the CRM side. Let’s face it, it is not uncommon for “Planning” to mean going into the store, buying the product, using it, then thinking and writing about the experience. Sometimes the over-achieving planner may pull up a syndicated research report to affirm their anecdotal experience–then bill the client plus 15 for a study they probably already own.
That hardly qualifies as a process that can be documented and measured.
Bridging the gap means managing risk
If you want your ideas to work–see them implemented–you’ve got to aggressively manage the risk side. Show your prospects how your offering is twice as good as doing nothing. Show your management how marketing is twice as good (financially) as not marketing. You’ve got to assume the risk associated with being accountable if your ideas don’t work, and be willing to adapt them to the information you get from putting your idea out there in the first place.
The willingness to take this step will bridge the gap between your efforts on the marketing side and the weighty fiscal demands from your prospects and your management.
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Tom Barnes is CEO of Mediathink , an Atlanta-based media consultancy specializing in marketing strategy and implementation.
