Bish! Bosh! Blended.

As in previous years, I left the Marketing Society Conference with my head bulging.  With facts, with conversations, with new ideas; and with new ways to look at old ones.  It’s hard to make sense of such a maelstrom of information, but a couple of days of reflection has allowed some of the key themes to sink in and turn themselves into meaningful bite size chunks that you might take away and act on.

Try reading the headings out loud (preferably in a shouty voice) whilst you record yourself on Instagram and who knows, you too could find 1.5m followers to match Lean in 15’s energising fitness guru Joe Wicks!

MEAN SOMETHING!

Pop a bit of purposefulness into your brand and hey presto, you’ll do better.  The speakers from Facebook (to make the world more open and connected), Aviva (making it easier for people to buy financial products) and Vitasoy (providing healthy food which doesn’t put the planet at risk) all emphasised that what drives them is more than money (although obviously money helps – particularly if you are Aviva, who could afford to spend £100m on innovation which didn’t work and then still have some spare change to start again).  In each case, they were driven by the desire to engage both customers and staff with a deeper purpose.  As Mark Wilson, CEO of Aviva said (I paraphrase), “if you can’t tweet your proposition, you don’t have a business.”.  Paddy Barwise of London Business School also picked up on the theme in his talk – encouraging marketing leaders to ‘start a movement’. 

GET SOME MATES!

There are some real changes afoot for CMOs.  It’s no longer about being the big ‘I’, as David Wheldon, who as CMO of RBS could easily claim to be one, said.  These days marketing is about ‘we’, the need to build communities around you.  This echoes the findings in Paddy Barwise’s excellent book on the 12 Powers of Marketing Leadership.  Paddy and his co-author, Thomas Barta identified that for marketers to be effective leaders they need to energise not simply their own teams, but their bosses and their colleagues in other departments.  It was a theme also covered by Nicola Mendelson of Facebook who sees marketing’s role as that of Chief Transformation Officer, and by another speakers as Chief Integration Officer and Chief Collaboration Officer.  No matter what the title, the goal is clear.  Customer customer experience is now the central driver of brand loyalty.  As Nigel Vaz of SapientNitro put it ‘The brands we love are no longer driven by ads, but by the services that they deliver to us’.  As a result, marketing must work with every department in the business to deliver customer delight.  Flying solo is no longer an option.

DON’T PUT IT OFF!!!!

Talking of flying, Dr Ed Lu’s tips for life resonated right across the day.  The idea of having a goal that people understand no matter how globally (or spatially) separated a team are, was central to the success of the emergency US/Russian space mission he was part of in 2003, immediately after the Space Shuttle Challenger tragedy.  But don’t micromanage from afar, he added. Leave people to make their own decisions about how to achieve the goal.  His recommendation not to put things off, sadly driven by the loss of a good friend and colleague with whom he simply had not had the time to connect with socially before the fatal Challenger flight, stayed with me.  There were echoes of it in Nicola Mendelson’s recommendation that you move fast and be prepared to shift resource in order to tackle problems in the business – fake news perhaps?  And Alibaba certainly didn’t put it off when they drove $12bn of sales in just 24 hours. McDonald's determination to constantly evolve their menu to respond to food lobbyists is another example.  Even McDonald's will be dead meat if they don’t move with the times. 

And as Ed Lu also said, safety first doesn’t get you anywhere.  You need to take risks, and you need to be an optimist – although it doesn’t hurt to prepare for the worst.

So there you have it.  BISH! BOSH! BLENDED.  The Marketing Society Conference ingredients in one simple jar.  DONE!