Whats Broken In Marketing — And How We Can Start To Fix It

Good marketing is hard ... for many reasons.

First, consumers are increasingly distracted by multiple factors (pandemic, politics, economics, etc.) making it difficult to capture their attention. With more channels and platforms than ever before, marketers need to be masters of omnichannel and be omniscient across all channels.

But sometimes it's hard to get good marketing... for the wrong reasons. Because let's face it, a lot of things in the world of marketing just don't work. It can be difficult to define a disability, but I'll try anyway.

And I'm sure I've missed a lot more, so I'd love to hear your thoughts. Think of it like a start list.

Let's start with a breakdown by agency

I call this change in the business world breathing in and out. It moves from centralized to decentralized and vice versa. The marketing/agency universe is no different. The current situation has changed. now all marketing needs come from one company, like a complex three-dimensional puzzle (including strategy, creative, media and production under one roof), and more recently digital technology, diversification and differentiation. . It suddenly seems like every brand marketer needs at least five different companies: strategy, creative, product, etc.

This piecemeal approach is, to put it mildly, an overcorrection. this introduces a lot of confusion, loss and misunderstanding in the marketing mix. (Now that the pendulum has swung back, fueled by inflation and the drive to cut costs, brands are looking to see what one company can do effectively, efficiently and at scale…like Quad.)

Marketers have lost too much control over customer data and information.

The Quad helps brands understand what we call marketing experience (MX), which includes all efforts to induce action, from consumer awareness and trust to brand preference and purchase. Just like CX (customer experience) is about improving the customer journey, MX is the end of the marketing journey; experience of marketers in providing content and experience to consumers.

We work with many of the world's largest brands (4500+) and see more top marketers expanding their datasets significantly. To manage their MX, marketers are developing programs to collect customer data from scratch and first.

For many marketers, this is a follow-up game that involves learning or re-learning who their customers are on a family level. As the cost of digital campaigns continues to rise and major social platforms disappear, many brands are finding they need to find new ways to manage their data. On which...

Marketers are too dependent on black boxes.

Over time, many brands rely too heavily on external algorithms and data systems (“black boxes”) that they cannot easily manage or fully understand. For example, marketers (as we all found out) gave up cookies a long time ago.

The much publicized cookie fiasco, which comes as Apple and other big tech players start to rethink data privacy, has been a wake-up call for marketers. At Quad, with our set of smart solutions, Signal by Quad, we advise our brand partners not only on the best way to collect their own data, but also on how to use it effectively in online and offline campaigns. brings me...

Many brands still treat online and offline marketing as separate entities.

The online experience of consumers informs and nurtures their offline experience, and vice versa. Digital and IRL intertwine, complement each other, and are part of every demographic (especially Millennials and Generation Z).

But too many brands treat online and offline marketing as two different things. Or at least manage them separately.

At Quad, we spend a lot of time helping brands reinvent MX, advising them to rethink customization, flow, integration, and messaging time online and offline. brings me...

Too many directions will ruin the marketing plan.

As my colleague Eric Ashworth, who heads the Quad agency and marketing solutions practice, likes to point out, every marketing session is a source of pain and conflict. If the strategy team is not fully aligned with the creative agency, it means the sand is in the gears with communications, digital team, social media team, production team, media planners and more. Marketers tend to think of this conflict as an inevitable part of their marketing experience. Because there are bottlenecks, and approvals always take time, right?

The reality is that there is a direct correlation between an increase in the amount of manual tasks in a marketing plan and a lower effectiveness (or even failure) of a given campaign. The reverse is also true. the simplification of your marketing experience that we care about at Quad has a liberating effect on creative effectiveness.

So how do we start fixing what's broken?

Part of my job as CMO for Quad is to listen to marketers. learn about their unique marketing challenges, learn about their unique pain points and help start a conversation to fix what goes wrong in marketing.

As always, the first step to solving a problem is... admitting that we have a problem.

That is why I am delighted that Quad will be speaking at and sponsoring the Forbes CMO Summit 2022 where we will continue these conversations at a high level.

If you are planning to participate, I look forward to meeting you. But if not, I would like to know what you think is wrong with marketing.

Contact me here and let's find the right solutions together.