#012: Death to Corporate Marketing

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Transcript

Matt Willis 0:00

Welcome to two a million and beyond. This is Matt Willis, death to Corporate Marketing. Quote, leading brands and agencies have known for many years that more creative work delivers better results than safe and rational advertising. Keith Weed, chief Marketing and communications officer at Unilever. How often does your phone buzz and just by reading half of the subject line, you can tell it's spam. Or have you ever wandered the maze of a corporate trade show only to find every booth feels the same. Do you remember a single ad you saw last week on LinkedIn? I sure don't. Growing a business requires developing systems. Effective marketing requires creativity to stand out. These two things can coexist, but in order to do this effectively, your marketing team must be free of corporate bureaucracy. This means you must be willing to one, say no to committee based decision making. When decisions are made based on group consensus, creativity gets neutered. Two, say no to short-term metrics. Short-term metrics, incentivize marketing teams to scream. Sale, sale, sale, which often yields short-term results, but has def, but has detrimental long-term effects. As JC Penney and Bed Bath Beyond will hopefully learn one of these days. Clients become conditioned to either ignore your shouts or just wait until your next sale. This leaves you with too narrow of a profit margin to grow. Steady growth comes from brand building over time, not primarily through sales activation. Three, say no to following the leader. This should be obvious marketing like everyone else defeats the purpose. Having spent nine years in tech, I've learned that common sense isn't common. If your customer would say, your ads look like your competitors, you're doing it wrong. If one media avenue is saturated by competitors, let them have that space. Plant your flag on the top of another mountain. This is one major challenge that industry specific marketing firms face. They may bring a level of knowledge about your industry, but their strategies tend to be rinse and repeat for all their clients. They like to say things like, we've taken this approach with hundreds of clients just like you, and they all get the same great results. I say run! To effectively market you need to catch people's attention, not blend in with how all the other industry ads look,