POV

Businesses long for marketing that works like a vending machine. Put your money in, and out pops your desired revenue, guaranteed. But the dream is far from attained and the urgency to increase marketing’s contribution to revenue intensifies in the digital era as in-person sales opportunities diminish.

Despite notable technological and operational advancements, marketing grapples with persistent challenges: deficits in customer experience, conflicts with sales over leads, power struggles over who’s in charge and who’s adding value, and the incessant inability to showcase clear return on investment (ROI). The toll on CMOs is evident with their average turnover being the shortest in the C-suite at three and a half years and continuing to decrease, according to executive recruiting company, Korn Ferry.

Embrace Marketing’s VUCA World

Breaking through this predicament requires that leaders acknowledge that marketing has never worked like a vending machine – and never will.

Markets are what scientists call complex systems, behaving more like stock markets and the weather than predictable machines. Marketing’s messy real world can be described with the acronym VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous). Interactions between billions of agents – consumers, buying teams, competitors, influencers, social networks, regulatory entities – produce numerous feedback loops that cause situations to change rapidly and introduce many unknowns.

Despite marketing’s VUCA reality, companies continually try to control it -- deploying industrial-era practices in their organizations, processes, and measurement methods. These machine-oriented practices improved efficiency when the world was slower and less connected. However, digital has increased marketing’s complexity by accelerating and entangling the world to such a degree that traditional management methods that worked in the industrial era regularly fail.

The misalignment between marketing’s complex nature and traditional management mechanics breeds mistrust and disappointment. In a business world where unpredictability is the norm, what replaces these practices?

Businesses Must Foster Marketing Agility and Market System Health

To thrive in the digitally transformed market, companies must adopt mindsets and work methods markedly different from those designed for the industrial era. Marketing leaders need a new management playbook — one that transforms the markets’ increasing complexity into powerful advantage.

Instead of the impossible task of trying to control complexity, leaders in other turbulent environments embrace it and learn to work with its peculiarities and powers. I’ve collected mindsets and methods inspired by surgical operating rooms, military theaters, gaming, stock market investing, software development, as well as pioneering marketing organizations into a new playbook for marketing leaders.

I’ve outlined four advantageous mind shifts, as well as recommended adaptations to organizations, operations, and intelligence systems. These mindsets and methods, which I call ComplexityWise marketing, will increase agility, thus boosting marketing’s ability to optimally respond to whatever pops up. They will also improve the health of the enterprise’s market system, which increases the probability that whatever uncontrollable things happen in the market will occur in the company’s favor. ComplexityWise marketing works by activating the human potential for problem-solving while leveraging technology to augment human capabilities

Four Mind Shifts for the Complex Digital Era

Mindsets have far-reaching influence, regardless of how aware we are of our beliefs. They direct our actions, and it is our actions that produce consequences and outcomes. To become more effective in marketing’s VUCA world, leaders must first think differently about four essential leadership tasks: budgets and resources, planning and measurement, decision-making, and managing people.

1. Think like an investor

This mind shift guides managers away from viewing the marketing funds as costs (where current assets are used to acquire a good or service), and towards understanding them as investments (where current assets are sacrificed to achieve a larger expected value over time). The cost center mentality, along with its evaluation methods – such as ROI return-on-investment – works well for stable, predictable, environments where the probability of outcomes can be anticipated. The investment metaphor is more appropriate for complex markets.

2. Think like a navigator

Because the road ahead constantly changes, this mind shift guides managers away from viewing marketing plans and performance data like a scorekeeper who builds static plans and measures progress against these, to understanding that plans must be dynamic and marketing measurement used as navigational insight guiding the organization towards its mission. The static view is why process waterfalls, big bang launches, fixed metrics and predictive planning don’t work.

3. Think like a statistician

How do you make marketing decisions when you’ll never have all the information? This mind shift guides managers away from viewing marketing decisions as resulting from deterministic causes-and-effects to understanding the probabilistic nature of market systems. The statistician’s view highlights strategies for decision-making under complex conditions.

4. Think like an ecologist

Employee performance emerges from the intersection of individual behavior and context. This mind shift guides managers away from viewing people simply as individual components used to operate a business to also generating environments that increase the potential for beneficial outcomes. The ecologist’s view explores an understanding of the emergence nature of behavior, how to create conditions for thriving, and the leader’s role in guiding cultural attributes.

Capabilities to Improve Outcomes in Complex Markets

Oprah Winfrey once quoted Maya Angelou as saying, “You did what you knew how to do, and when you knew better, you did better.” ComplexityWise mind shifts will help leaders know better, and developing ComplexityWise capabilities will help them do better.

As with mindsets, the shifts in key operational capabilities carry extra power for succeeding in marketing’s VUCA reality.

• Collective Intelligence: Intelligence is fundamental to agility and to the optimal development of market system health. Upgrading analytics practices and integrating technology systems with human contributions is essential.
• Integrated Teams: Moving away from traditional silos and lofty hierarchies to connect organizations into more flexible structures, improves performance at the company edge where the company meets its customers and offers benefits to employees.
• Agile Operations: Optimal work processes leverage Agile methods. When balanced with selected practices retained from the industrial era, these provide more flexible ways of navigating changing context.
• Emergent Transformation: While change is always a challenge, the connectivity of systems offers the strange characteristic of emergence as an underutilized and almost magical power to make things move.

Working with marketing’s great, big, messy real world instead of ignoring it, companies will empower marketing leaders to create adaptable, resilient marketing systems that thrive in uncertainty. Unlock your team’s full potential and turn complexity into opportunity.

BOOK: Find out more about the book, ‘Marketing in the (Great, Big, Messy) Real World’