Volume 148: Dog Days of Summer.
Dog Days of Summer.
tl;dr: A trawl through the recesses of my mind.
I don’t have anything prepped this week, so this edition is more of a ramble through the disorganization of my mind. My apologies.
We’ve been seeing various articles about the transformation of advertising agencies lately, which suggests the long-running saga of long hours for poor pay to deliver mediocre work in a grim environment led by terrible human beings is finally catching up to them.
It’s pretty obvious that a rose-tinted view of design as the savior of advertising is abject nonsense. Not least of which because, A. Every ad agency has stumbled when creating design or branding shops, so why will now be different? (Hint, it’s a different business, not a tack-on service you chuck in to try and “rescue the relationship”), and, B. Ad agencies are suddenly recycling design as an idea just as the design hype cycle passes. Oops.
Then we have multiple articles focused on the transformation of Huge into a “product” shop. Not sure this is the answer either, but I understand that pricing by product is likely vastly easier and more effective to manage than the “all you can eat buffet.” (Nice analogy, by the way).
We could talk until we’re blue in the face about what ails advertising agencies. I’ve never worked in one, so I’m conscious of the potential for my own Dunning Kruger bias to be at play, but there is one issue that doesn’t get talked about enough. I wonder if a major wrong turn wasn’t taken back when digital first started rearing its head. For the first time in a long time, ad-agency revenues became truly squeezed, and they suddenly realized they were viewed as fairly low-level vendors rather than strategic partners to their clients. So they renamed planning departments “strategy” in the vain hope that it would magically enable a journey up the totem pole toward a seat at the top table.
The problem is that it was never going to work. First, clients already have strategic advisors crawling all over them; they work for the likes of McKinsey, BCG, and Bain. Second, nobody ever hired an ad agency to be strategic because advertising is widely viewed as a tactical discipline. So, labeling planners strategists didn’t make the agency more strategic, it just rendered the strategist title meaningless. Let’s face it, no client is ever going to hire an agency strategist to do what a management consultant is vastly more experienced at, known for, and well-armed to do. In the process, the agencies lost sight of their actual value, which is surely to be master tacticians within an increasingly complex and difficult environment.
We’ve lifted so much of our strategic discourse from the military, so I guess someone might have realized that when we discuss history’s great generals, we don’t refer to them as great strategists. No, we laud them for their tactical genius. Rather than deny what they had become, I suspect ad agencies could have fashioned a unique seat at the top table had they transformed themselves into the best tacticians money could buy rather than waving the term strategist around in surrender like a pair of dirty white underpants tied to a stick.
Next up, B2B branding has been getting a lot of attention recently, and not before time. This article from LinkedIn & WARC really caught me off guard. Not because it’s amazing but because it’s highlighting something so utterly basic and obvious that it was a straight-between-the-eyes moment. The premise is simple. Companies have pursued lofty purpose at a brand level and deeply activation-focused feature/function messaging at a product level, leaving a gaping hole where the promise to the customer should be. D’oh!
It’s frankly shocking that this should have to be written down, but it’s clearly necessary because it’s clearly a very real problem.
Staying on the B2B theme, I stumbled across this article over at the Harvard Business Review’s dumb Internet cousin, which also highlights something utterly obvious that many companies are getting wrong. Put simply, 80-90% of B2B buyers already have brands in mind when drawing up an RFP shortlist, and that shortlist often has as few as two companies on it. So if you’re focusing all of your attention on activation-based activities, sales enablement, account-based marketing, lead generation, and all that bottom-of-the-funnel stuff, you’re toast. Your customers are likely bypassing you because you did nothing to appeal to them or attract their attention before they were ready to buy, so you’re not on the list.
I’ve witnessed the ill effects of this for years, where a client feels like a competitor is sucking all the oxygen out of the room, that they’d really love it if they weren’t having to spend half the precious time a prospect gives them just explaining who they are, and although they believe they have a superior product and win more than their fair share of opportunities, they’d really love to have more of those opportunities in the first place…this, folks, is an archetypal manifestation of B2B brand weakness.
So, to round this off, here are three things that B2B marketers need to fix:
Invest in your brand, not just sales activation. The idea you can effectively capture the small percentage of customers who are ready to buy at the exact moment they’re ready to buy is nonsense. You need to prime the pump first.
Grow your base, don’t just view cross-selling to existing customers as a sure-fire path to growth. While it sure feels comforting when you have a huge sales team to feed, there’s zero data to support this as a growth strategy.
Get your value propositions sorted out. It’s crazy how few B2B companies know how to frame their offering relative to real client needs and problems. The shift to a business outcomes focus is rendered moot when you can’t articulate the business outcome you’re delivering. Saying “we deliver business outcomes” is just as frustrating to prospective clients as describing your product features.
Finally, and this is a bit more philosophical, I wonder if the era of “product-led growth” is over, or at least the current iteration of it. (Although this guy thinks it’s taking off ¯ \_(ツ)_/¯ ). It’s been notable in the past year or two how many clients and potential clients I’ve talked to about how their products aren’t selling themselves anymore. To be honest, I’m not sure they ever did.
However, it’s also obvious to see how the world has changed. The idea of “product-led growth” was very much espoused by digital-native corporations over the past ten or twenty years. Certainly, it’s a term I first heard around 2009/2010. And, if we go back in time, there were vastly fewer digital products available back then. For context, the Apple App Store in 2008 had 50,000 apps; today, it has almost 4 million. I’d also hazard a guess that a smaller percentage of the 50,000 apps in 2008 were good products compared to a higher percentage of the current 4 million.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that when there are vastly more products available, and more of these products are good rather than mediocre, then having yours stand out and sell itself because it’s superior to competing options is going to be increasingly unlikely.
In many ways, I think digital world products are just becoming more like physical world products. It was never the case that a superior product sold itself, it just felt like that when there were fewer options available, and most of those that were were crap. Bring the volume of choices up to par with the broader market environment along with a general bar raising on quality, and suddenly product-led growth doesn’t look quite so viable anymore.
Of course, there’s also a philosophical meta-theory that overlays the term, which is the engineer’s perspective that products that require “marketing” (by which they really mean “advertising”) are drastically inferior, only made successful via the advertising crutch supporting it.
This has always been complete nonsense, but it’s an exceedingly common trope. As the old saying goes, nothing kills a bad product faster than great advertising.
No. I deeply suspect a lot of digitally native corporations are going to have to fundamentally re-tool themselves to be great at product and great at marketing, and the marketing they need to get great at isn’t in their comfort zone of product marketing. Instead, it will require brand-building competence to stand out and drive preference in an increasingly competitive world.