Is Marketing due for a rebrand?

What do I mean by Marketing, and why do I think it needs a rebrand?

You may be asking yourself, ‘Why is someone whose career has been mostly spent in communications writing about marketing? ’ And that’s the precise reason why I am here today to tell you why I think the marketing field is ripe for a rebrand.  

I come from an integrated marketing background. The way I define this is: the practice of aligning all marketing tactics to the same core messaging for a consistent customer experience with your brand.

I’ve been a PR consultant, a marketing strategist for political campaigns, and run partnerships and brand campaigns. The through-line of my career has been positioning an idea —whether it's a brand, initiative, or government official —and developing a strategy to cut through the noise and reach a specific goal. That goal may be to topple YouTube (....it was a noble mission, MySpace video) or to be seen as the leading voice in Congress for policies that advance working families. Or it may be to create the conditions to allow driverless cars to operate more widely in cities across the globe. Though to your everyday startup founder or B2B or B2C marketing leader, none of this sounds like marketing. Why is that?

What is marketing?

The agreed-to definition by the powers that be (aka the American Marketing Association) is “Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large”. This is a pretty broad definition. 

What marketing, in practice, is 

Marketing is viewed as a cost-center, and in the age of COVID-19-cost-cutting and the COVID-recession, these budgets are easy targets for companies to slash. However, this belief overlooks the fact that Marketing, at its core, is essential to how a company attracts customers, accompanies those customers on their journey from initial interest to becoming a user, and ultimately grows the corporate relationship from user to brand champion. Marketing isn’t purely paid media and online growth tactics, nor is it an amorphous ‘feeling’ that you get when you see the expressions of a brand. 

Why a rebrand is necessary 

In a startup scenario, founders may not believe they actually need marketing. In fact, they may believe that by creating a standout technology or a great UX, they will be able to virally acquire customers. Or perhaps they believe their product is so good that it just needs someone to ‘promote’ it, so they hire a PR person to ‘push out’ their story to all the top-tier reporters who are eager to write about them, or that if they build a community platform, people will flock.

In both of these situations, proceeding without a strategic vision or a broader narrative about the world as a company sees it, marginalizes the need for people to feel human emotion for the brand. However, brand creation and cultivation aren’t as simple as deploying tools and tactics.

You must first identify the audience (customer/client/partner/segment of society/etc), the problem you’re solving for the audience, and a clear articulation of how your solution fixes the problem—setting a team and a founder up for failure. 

Standard definitions of paid media and growth hacking rely upon a compelling story - but without a compelling reason for being there, there is no hacking your way to success. Furthermore, try asking anyone who has pitched a reporter when there is no story to be told. Without customers or a compelling reason for being, promotion falls flat on its face.

Marketing is the function that identifies the audience’s specific needs and engages that audience to tell them the story of how a product or service can solve that problem for them. Marketing is also the broader role of orchestrating the matchmaking interaction between a potential customer and the solution. 

Marketing plays a crucial role in orchestrating the customer journey to bring them along for the matchmaking/interaction.

Channels of marketing all play different roles in the broader symphony - like string instruments and percussion: everything must come together for the melody to carry.

Communications - earned media: how do we earn interest, and earn coverage? 

Brand/Creative - creative, the full expression of the product - the ‘experience’ and engagements; Product - where the business meets story - aligning product and features to ensure the actual product aligns with the story marketing is trying to tell

Growth/Performance - paid search/ads/optimization/technical/where engineering meets story

None of these functions can operate independently of the others. This isn’t to say you need a separate person in each role (a challenge for many companies just starting to grow!), but having a designated person responsible for the function is essential to ensuring the core pillars are covered.

For example

• Comms needs to see how its story resonates - or isn’t resonating - with the web traffic. This is where growth can come in.
• Product needs to know how its value proposition will play in the media and with the thought-leaders who influence a given audience - this is where communications comes in
• The expression of Brand impacts the A/B tests of growth and all external-facing collateral both the marketing org, but that which the entire company, promotes.

Which brings me to my hypothesis and alternative hypothesis: 

H0: Marketing is due for a rebrand

Ha: Marketing is due for a level set of what it is - maybe it’s not due for a rebrand, but instead a reframing of what it is for executives and discussion within its own ranks of how it became so mired in tactical discussion/deep black box ‘secrets’ 

There is no tactical ‘hack’ for good marketing. Just like posting a viral video to MySpace video required understanding the audience's attention span, or how sending a fundraising email blast required timing and messaging related to an activating moment – for which the campaign had no control, a team must have all the elements in place to capitalize on those opportunities.

You can have fantastic SEO and SEM - but if your message doesn’t resonate with your prospective buyers and you aren’t properly positioned, no amount of exposure will get you to your end goal of greater audience share/customer acquisition. 

While it’s great to get in front of all these audiences, if you don’t know what these audiences want and what their emotional connection is to the problem you are claiming to solve for them, it’s all for naught. 

P.S. - PR suffers from this challenge, too. 

Marketing applies to all buyers and all consumers. That mom who needs to pick the right daycare center is bombarded with different pieces of content that ultimately influence her decision. How is your marketing, your brand, in her mix? How is your story standing out beyond the rest? 

What about Marketing in regulated industries (aka. I need the Government to sign off on my existence)?

Governments - as a company operating in a regulated industry, or a company that seeks government approval for an activity you wish to conduct (new office space? Applying for a tax credit?), you want the official to understand and appreciate your position - but they have other needs too, which you’re trying to cut through. It’s not enough to have a great relationship with a person who works on an official’s staff, or a legally solid argument for why you exist - you have to understand the government official’s core need and how what you’re doing is solving this problem for them.  

The tactics of marketing still apply: how does what you are offering solve a core problem for the government?

• Job security?
• Creating a better society?
• Improve a problem their district, state, or nation is facing?

If what you’re doing requires their buy-in and doesn’t meet any of the above criteria, it is time to reevaluate how you’re going to attract this stakeholder who ultimately determines whether you have a pathway to scale or if, quite simply, what you have will not pass muster. You have to find a different path. 

How do Marketers rebrand Marketing?

Recently, I heard a fantastic process outlined for the basis of all good marketing is in the peer-to-peer marketing community, Sharebird. It's straightforward: research, position, launch. However, where teams and marketers often struggle is in executing each of these steps and evaluating their readiness to proceed to the next step with honesty. Too frequently, marketers, stretched for time and unable to convince their executive peers, or product or sales counterparts, skip the research, flub the positioning, and launch - hoping for the best. This rarely works and often leads to lower job satisfaction and shorter employment tenures.

This outline gets to the core of what good marketing is - researching your audience to understand their needs and problems deeply, positioning your brand and solution as the best way to solve the problem (assuming that it actually is), and utilizing every channel within marketing to launch the product into the audience’s sphere. Coming to a customer with a solution in search of a problem is not something marketing, nor a magician for that matter, can solve.

But while this may seem straightforward, ensuring that customer research, proper positioning, and launching in an integrated way isn't just up to the marketer. It's not even up to the CMO in a later-stage company or public enterprise. This is something that has to be fundamentally understood and agreed to by leadership. The CEO must not bypass these steps and ask why his launch failed. The Chief Product Officer must be honest when her team builds a solution, but it doesn't fit a problem their target audience experiences. And the Chief Revenue Officer or even the Account Executive must not push for a launch of a product when neither the problem is being solved nor the correct positioning between customer and problem has been found. A rebrand is indeed necessary—or at the very least, an internal brand education campaign.

,