Surviving in the Marketing Jungle

Marketing is about survival in a jungle that has no mercy, particularly for members of one of the least understood clans in the corporate world.

If you play the game well, you’ll get additional opportunities. Many companies now have Chief Revenue Officers, which formally combine sales and marketing. You could eventually get IT: Gartner research VP Laura McLellan* predicts that by 2017 CMOs will spend more on IT than CIOs. And you might even have a shot at the top position, as did James White who become the CEO Jamba Juice.

Based on interviews and research, those who just focus on "marketing" are less likely to succeed. The successful CMO needs to think act like the CEO of a business – your business is the business of "understanding, attracting, and keeping valuable customers."** You need to become the CEO of Marketing™.

Forget Everything that Got You Here

You've just landed that CMO or executive marketing job you've wanted for years.

Congratulations! Bask in the glory.

For about a minute.

Now focus on this: 45 months* - or if you're in healthcare, automotive, restaurant or communications / media, 28 to 32 months.

That’s the average life of a CMO (and if you're not the CMO, you need to start thinking about his or her replacement...)

And that’s the good news – the lifespan is up from 23 months in 2006! But less than four years is hardly a career, and what you do during three critical time periods will determine your success, and your tenure:

Generating meaningful insights

with Liam Fahey

Intelligence that makes a difference – that creates insights – is almost always the result of collaboration between intelligence professionals and decision executives. Neither one alone can create and leverage intelligence. 

Executives influence the direction of intelligence work. They shape the context for the work: they identify the current and emerging issues and decisions, questions they want addressed, areas and topics they would like explored, and, the nature of the dialogue they desire with the intelligence professionals. 

Intelligence professionals create understanding and meaning out of disparate and always incomplete data, disconnected viewpoints and perspectives, and an ever-changing competitive environment. 

When they work in tandem, they co-create an understanding of change and its business implications. This understanding influences what the organization thinks about (e.g. which emerging opportunities or risks need attention), how it thinks (e.g. identifying, challenging and refining core assumptions), the decisions it makes (e.g. what strategic moves to make, what business unites to support) and the actions it takes (e.g. where to allocate resources).

The critical role of the executive in intelligence

with Liam Fahey

Insight is where the game is won and lost notes that "Intelligence as an influence on decision making has not yet fully bloomed in many companies," listing a number of reasons why.

What an intelligence organization looks like notes that "...today’s most successful intelligence teams have adopted a post-industrial, networked model, co-creating insights with decision makers..."

These lead to a series of observations gained over several decades working with some of the world's leading organizations:

What an intelligence-driven organization looks like

with Liam Fahey

What an Intelligence-Driven Solution Looks Like

Insight is where the game is won and lost notes that "Intelligence as an influence on decision making has not yet fully bloomed in many companies," listing a number of reasons why.

To address these challenges, today’s most successful intelligence teams have adopted a post-industrial, networked model, co-creating insights with decision makers, not just producing documents, powerpoints and spreadsheets. They build and sustain an intelligence capability that delivers real business results by:

Insight is where the game is won and lost

with Liam Fahey

Intelligence enables superior decision making when it generates insight

Every organization faces a critical need: to understand the emerging and future world better and faster than rivals.

All rivals are looking at the same world, so the real battle is to determine who “sees” the underlying change more incisively than the competition. Capturing “change insight” before rivals creates the potential for competitive advantage: knowing where the marketplace opportunities may be, where the risks or vulnerabilities may be and, importantly, knowing what to do. In short, without superior insight, winning over time is simply not possible.

Amazon's "Surprise" Attack on the Grocery Business

The news that Amazon is readying a major roll out of its online grocery business will catch many grocers unprepared.

This despite the fact that Peapod has been perfecting its model since 1989, reaching sales $500 million last year, there are an estimated 1600 online competitors, and Wal Mart decided the category was large enough to enter in 2011. And Amazon's initiative has been five years in the making.

Many will justify their lack of action because, at $6 billion, the category is just over 1% of the $550 billion food market in the US. It's just not big enough, yet, they'll say.

And one morning, they'll wake up, "surprised" at how big the category has become and try to mount an effective response.

It will be too late.

What did they do wrong?

Surprise rarely occurs because of lack of signals; it's due to either misreading indicators or when an organization's view of the environment, conditioned by past perceptions, prevents it from correctly seeking or interpreting indicators or emerging trends.

Take Pearl Harbor - why did the US navy fail to detect anytime in advance the movement of the most powerful fleet in history? It was not as if Japan's blue water fleet was a surprise - in 1905 it destroyed the Russian Pacific fleet; nor were Japan's expansionist intentions a secret - it invaded Manchuria in 1931. Given this, "intelligence officers could perhaps have foreseen the attack if the US, years before, had...flown regular aerial reconnaissance of the the Japanese navy, put intercept units aboard ships sailing close to Japan...or recruited a network of marine observers to report on ship movements." [Kahn, "The Intelligence Failure of Pearl Harbor," Foreign affairs, 70, no. 5 (Winter 1991/1992)]

In other words, you can't find what you're not looking for. Said another way, we create our own surprises.

What "surprises" await your organization?