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for the modern marketer

Recession, the rise of digital and the emphasis on media
neutrality are just some developments making new
demands on marketers and changing marketings role in
the company structure. Here we glean the ten best ideas
from the worlds foremost marketers for embracing this
change and steering your brand for the future.
By Joe Fernandez

18 | Marketing Week | 15 October 2009 | marketingweek.co.uk

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the gurus
Arun Sinha, chief marketing and communications
officer at Zurich Financial Services
Philippe Zell, senior
vice-president and chief marketing officer of
Novartis Consumer Health
Ely Dahan, professor of marketing at the
University of California
Chris Hughes, co-founder
of Facebook and founder
of My.BarackObama.com
Michael Conrad, president of the Berlin School of
Creative Leadership
Scott Davis, senior partner at Prophet
Christine Nordhielm, professor of marketing at
the University of Michigan
Allen Thrasher, marketing principal at InfoPrint
Solutions EMEA

ho can predict the future of

marketing? Executives from
brands such as Google,
Facebook, Zurich and Novartis
and a range of academics have
come up with definitive
predictions for how to steer marketing into 2010
and beyond.
At the European Chief Marketing Officer
Conference in Zurich earlier this month, the
brand guardians (some are pictured above) laid
out their vision for the future of the industry,
which Marketing Week has compiled into ten
commandments for the modern marketer
(see description of the modern marketers
mindset, page 21).
Marketing roles are evolving with some in
the industry even talking about how job titles
are likely to change away from marketing to
terms that reflect the bigger scope of the role. As
such, chief marketing officers have been forced
to rethink their strategies and adopt new tactics
to get their messages across to consumers.
These ten commandments are inspired by what
the worlds most powerful marketers think their
peers need to embrace in order to spot
opportunities within crises and set up their
businesses to flourish both next year and in
future decades.

2010 is about dialogue, not

marketing
The traditional working practice of
marketers of moving from campaign to
campaign needs to shift to maintaining
ongoing conversations with everyone involved
with or connected to the brand.
CMOs must make sure that everyone within
the business understands the brand in depth.
The companys ideas must be firmly embedded
in employees minds all based on the insights
that customers have given them in the first place.
Scott Davis, senior partner at Prophet,
explains: Its important that you show how a
good dialogue can directly affect stakeholder
value through transparent conversations with
your customers and your board. Maximising
ways of doing that is essential. Its not enough to
be the person in charge of advertising any more.
Arun Sinha, chief marketing and
communications officer at Zurich Financial

Services, agrees that maintaining a dialogue

makes a huge difference.
You have to reflect the cultural shifts that are
going on outside the walls of your own
company, he notes. He says that within his own
business, this meant creating a new brand
entirely HelpPoint that would help Zurich
give its customers somewhere to focus their
conversation.
Sinha says it was vital to create a dialogue
reminding customers that we put them first and
that they are at the heart of everything we do.
Online, user-generated content is helping to
make customers feel a part of the brand. Chris
Hughes, co-founder of Facebook and founder of
My.BarackObama.com, the official presidential
campaign social networking website for
President Obama, stresses: Its so important
that brands focus on the idea of sharing and
giving people a voice. We made every single
member feel that they had a role in the
presidential campaign and that they knew
Obama was listening to them. This sort of
dialogue is essential to a brands success.
Ely Dahan, professor of marketing at the
University of California, agrees. In the highly
interactive world of web 2.0, consumers suggest
new product options and sometimes even develop
their own products and services. Consumer
involvement could revolutionise marketing.
However, this doesnt mean marketers can sit
back and let consumers do all the hard work.
Real dialogue and participation is about taking
consumer insights and then using marketing skill
to shape them for the brand. Companies need
filtering mechanisms to identify those options
with the greatest potential, Dahan admits.

Think like the brand

architect of your company
Marketers need to think about their
roles in the context of other
professions. Philippe Zell, senior vicepresident and chief marketing officer of Novartis
Consumer Health, explains: Taking lessons
from other sectors can be a worthwhile
experiment.
Christine Nordhielm, professor of marketing at
the University of Michigan, suggests that too
many marketers are currently acting like
anaesthetists sending consumers to sleep

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Agencies response to
the ten commandments
Kevin Allen, vice-chairman of Lowe
Worldwide, says: In a supply economy, the
company ran the show. In the demand
economy, the customer is firmly in charge and
a dialogue which includes no small amount
of listening is the order of the day. Brands
are at the core of the companys entire being.
Chris Hirst, managing director of Grey
London warns: These can be very easy
things to say, but the proof will only come if
they practise what they preach. Evolving the
importance of marketing and eliminating silos
is a goal that everyone involved in the
industry wants to see happen. The reality is
that the difficulties we are facing right now,
means that we can only focus on the now.
Thats not burying our heads in the sand, but
working on fusing old and new media and
helping to change traditional mentalities.
Rory Sutherland, vice-chairman of Ogilvy
Group UK, says: I would like to see
marketing rather than restructuring,
financial manipulation, cost-cutting, mergers
and numerical window-dressing to become
the first place organisations look to for
innovation, growth and the creation of
sustainable long-term value. If we are to
recover financially, it is worth remembering
that no one has ever cost-cut their way back
to growth.
Richard Huntington, director of strategy at
Saatchi & Saatchi, cautions: While these ten
points are with merit, the problem is that they
should have been the way that marketing was
approached over the past decade. Instead
there has been a lot of blame flying around

with their predictable communications. She

warns that they are using ordinary techniques,
which may lack competitive advantage, adding
that: The greatest challenge facing CMOs is to
keep up with the mindset of the modern
consumer and continue to engage with them in
the way they desire.
The best role model for the modern marketer
is the architect, suggests Andy Stefanovich, a
senior partner at agency Prophet. Architects
constantly focus on innovation and creativity, yet
within rigorous, measured parameters. That
makes a good model for marketers to follow.
Stefanovich recommends that all companies
use a five-point checklist (see The Five Ms, page
22) to help them remember all the different
elements that can make a difference in how they
approach their work.

Make sure you talk to staff

as well as customers
All staff within a business should feel
like they have been given a voice and
have the ability to shape perceptions of
the company. They should feel they have a role in

from all parties in marketing. What would be

nice is if people take stock of these and realise
the value of participatory marketing only
time will tell.
Meera Chandra, managing director at
Syzygy, says: Todays agencies must
seamlessly integrate with the marketing
departments of their clients in order to effect
real change. It is imperative that a web 2.0
scenario exists between client and agency
with mutual sharing of knowledge and
understanding of the brand and the
competitive market. The best ideas today
arrive out of co-creation between agency and
client and indeed between consumer and
brand manufacturer.
Andy Lear, head of planning at Publicis,
adds: Advertising should absolutely remain
focused on capitalising on a target audience
and seizing their imagination. But the ways
we can do this have fundamentally changed,
and agencies are beginning to adapt to reflect
that. Weve rebuilt our entire agency model
around creating engaging content that aims to
be useful, interesting or entertaining in the
most relevant channel for the audience.
Stephen Woodford, chairman and CEO of
DDB UK Group, concludes: These points are
essential for success in good times and a
survival necessity when times are tough. But
Id add an 11th: create an effectiveness
culture where the bottom line contribution of
marketing is continually assessed and fed
back to inform and improve performance.
Econometric analysis is the cornerstone of this
and, in my view, it is still an underused tool.

co-creating a culture that resonates with them,

because they are being listened to and therefore
feel attached to the brand.
Zurichs Sinha says marketing should begin
internally and then be followed externally. The
only way to do this is to get buy-in from the very
top. He explains: You have to get the board to
support your new mantra first and then follow it
through across the company.
It is vital to make sure people inside the
business understand the companys vision and
identity long before they try to translate it to
those outside. Ensure that every staff member
understands, says Sinha. They have to drive
and create the momentum internally, so that
must be prepared first.
By communicating the marketing internally, it
also helps brands to avoid simply shouting a
message they think people want to hear and
instead create something that staff are happy to
talk about with customers. Doing this effectively,
says Facebooks Hughes, is what creates the
dialogue necessary with potential customers.
He says: Its about getting staff to understand
how to work well with their supporters and build

20 | Marketing Week | 15 October 2009 | marketingweek.co.uk

fruitful relationships. Opportunities like this

means that people want to be involved as much
as the staff do. For instance, we raised $500m
(313m) of the $800m (500m) of Obamas
presidential campaign funds online.

Become the chief

brand officer on
the board
In tricky economic times, it
would be easy for marketers to
keep their heads down in order
to avoid being noticed spending too much of the
boards money. But Martin Roll, business and
brand strategist at Venture Republic, and the
conference chair, argues: Marketing and
branding must be elevated to boardroom level
across corporations and become more strategic
with a top-management driven agenda.
This will require a shift, warns Prophets
Davis. While most boards would claim that they
understand the value of marketing, this is still
not entirely the case. The majority of CEOs and
boards dont get what marketing is. To change
this, marketers need to gain their recognition,
he says.
To do this effectively, Davis claims there will
need to be a radical rethink of exactly what the
role of a modern marketer should be. There
needs to be a much tighter way of working by
being responsible for more than just marketing.
Marketers have every right to co-own other
departments. [Marketers] should get themselves
in a position where they are driving business
strategy board-level discussions.
Novartis Zell says the challenge is to convince
boards that their brand positioning will fundamentally make a difference to the bottom line.
Modern CMOs have to show that they are
forward-thinking all the time, he claims. For
me, it means challenging science and building
marketing based on consumer insight. This way,
I can encourage the board to launch new
variants, and show them that we are putting the
consumer first and are innovating to stay ahead
of the competition.
At Zurich, Sinha says he took the approach of
encouraging the board to adopt a looking
outside their traditional philosophy of business
to launch his HelpPoint campaign. Changing a
frame of mind is not easy, nor does it happen
overnight. What I took upon myself to do was
remind the board that they wanted to stand out
more, and ensure that they knew that everything
we do is for the benefit of the customer.
Asking the board to be brave and step away
from the familiar areas where it was comfortable
paid off, he claims, saying that it helped develop
the brands lasting message, still being
celebrated today.

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Marketers should be responsible for more

than just marketing, they have every right
to co-own other departments. Marketers
should get themselves in a position where
they are driving board-level business
strategy discussions. Scott Davis, Prophet
Personalise, personalise,
personalise
Marketers need to target people
effectively by ensuring they treat
their potential customers as
individuals. Michael Conrad, president of the
Berlin School of Creative Leadership, says:
Marketing should work under an ethos of
inspiration for chosen audiences. Brands should
use the insight to gather a psychographical
perspective of who they should be looking to
target with ads in the first place. Targeting and
personalisation will be core to retention and
acquisition in the future.
Online brands such as Facebook and Google
are leading the way with this service.
Facebooks Hughes says that consumers are
increasingly overwhelmed and looking for the
personal touch to build trust and loyalty. If you
can get this right, he adds, eventually a deep
relationship forms.
Google sales manager Dr Beat Bhlmann
argues: Personalisation will be the future of
marketing. By stimulating interest based on
peoples online habits, consumers will respond
better to marketing and will feel connected to
the brand, in a different way to more traditional
media formats.
Companies such as InfoPrint Solutions
Company, a joint venture between IBM and
Ricoh, are already practising this in their
marketing. Allen Thrasher, marketing principal
at InfoPrint Solutions EMEA, says she thinks that
no marketing campaign should be considered
without thought on how best to make it
personal.
Moving to personalisation presents the CMO
with more opportunities to interact with the
consumer, she says.

Media neutral needs to be

more than a catchphrase
Budgets should be spread across all
media. Its no use brands just claiming
to be media neutral and then failing to
consider any but the most traditional options.
Part of the CMOs job is to ensure that their
brand is wherever the consumer is.
Googles Dr Bhlmann explains: There is no
wall between online and offline, but CMOs must
realise that, used correctly, online can be a huge
generator for sales because it reaches the
audience at the time when their interest is
peaked.
People simply dont live in an online or
offline world these days; consumers mix their
media and brands must do the same, says Dr
Bhlmann. We live in a culture of research
online, purchase offline. Its important that CMOs
think in a much more integrated way plotting

Zurich HelpPoint:
Created to give Zurich
customers somewhere to
focus their conversation

their marketing across disciplines so information

can be found at all the peak interest moments.
At InfoPrint Solutions, the company is calling
on marketers to think about accurate targeting
both on paper and online. Combining these
elements is what can make a campaign work
even harder. Thrasher says: Technology is
increasingly becoming sophisticated enough to
make cross-media promotions more possible.
Facebook is one company trying to introduce
these cross-media opportunities. It not only
encourages brands to publicise their fan pages
on offline material, but also allows users to
purchase ads to appear at the same time as
other media might be being digested.
Facebooks Hughes explains: Were just
beginning to see the start of an information
revolution, enabling greater transparency and
openness. Brands have to adopt this same model
across media. The more meat in the pot, the
better the stew.

Now is the time

to experiment
With the economy at a low,
experimentation has not been high on
marketers priorities this year.
However, with the lull beginning to lift, brands
must look for new customer insight and find
ways of utilising innovation to capture
consumers attention in ways that resonate more
with their lifestyles.
InfoPrint Solutions Thrasher says: There is
an opportunity now to find out what your
customers like and what they are less receptive
to. Its the perfect time to experiment with crossmarketing techniques and look to directly
correspond with your customers in ways that are
relevant and right for them. Customer strategies
have never been so open to so many options for
communication.
This approach is taken by Novartis, where the
company changes its approach to marketing its
drugs to suit different audiences. Zell explains:
Change the benefits of the products; dont just
have a one-minded approach as to who you
target. You dont have to stick with one
stereotype, but can exploit methods that have
worked in other sectors and incorporate them
into your marketing.
According to Prophets Davis, it is this type of
visionary approach that will help marketers in the
future. Its no bad thing to experiment and drive
growth by being a power-engine. You should
constantly push the boundaries and always think
of the return on investment that experimentation
could generate for you. The secret weapon is a
repository full of customer insights.
At Zurich, Sinha says that as a very traditional
insurer, it felt adopting a new way of working

The modern marketers mindset

G Always remember that marketing is a
conversation. Its always available and is
shared constantly.
G Be prepared to forward-think.
G Come up with ways to keep the customer
front-of-mind at all times.
G Be prepared to learn. You need to keep up
with the constant changes that surround
marketing.
G Have consumer insight at the heart of
everything you do.
G Work closely with creative partners, both
in-house and externally. Their ideas will
rub off on you.
G Identify new and innovative methods of
getting people engaged with the brand.
Experiment.
G Make it as easy as possible for a consumer
thinking of the brand to find it instantly.
G Work with colleagues across the
organisation to develop an understanding
of the business from top to bottom with a
career goal in sight of becoming
tomorrows growth leader.
G Dont overthink strategies. Remember, the
fundamental truths of marketing havent
changed.
G Help your agency partners to understand
your objectives and deliver them in a way
that gets the brand noticed above its
competitors.
G Recognise success across other sectors and
find new ideas for the brand.

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Novartis: Takes lessons from
other sectors and applies it to
its advertising; it says never
be bound by sector rules
on marketing

The tools are available for anyone

to keep up to date with the habits
of 21st century consumers, online
and offline. The key now is for
CMOs to work with this data.
Dr Beat Bhlmann, Google
around its HelpPoint brand promise was
risky but feels that it has paid off.
Facebooks Hughes echoes these sentiments:
With the work we did on the Obama campaign,
the experiment of getting people involved
digitally was a shot in the dark, but it has
resonated with politics worldwide now. Future
campaigns could also see this success, if they
only begin with a pure social experiment that
sees where it goes.

Pare back to your

core activities
Its important to remember that your
core brands are the ones that will
generate the most for the bottom
line and not everything should
change due to the effects of the
recession.
Novartis Zell explains: Large corporations
should focus on their strategic brands and build on
consumer insight to re-invest in them and increase
their consumer profile. Its all about seeking
maximum ways to increase the brands potential
and harnessing the needs your consumers are
telling you they are seeking either through
variants or complete re-positioning.
Zurichs Sinha adds: You should never forget
the core of what your company does and never
let your employees do this either. He says that
to keep brand managers focused on the core
elements their customers want, he sends them
out to answer calls in the firms contacts centres.
He says: Id encourage others to think about
their core activities like this.

A new role for advertising

and communication
Marketing no longer means simply
advertising products or services.
Advertising is seen as just one small
area of the wider marketing picture. Prophets
Davis says that this requires brands to take a
longer-term approach and calls for more
collaboration from communications suppliers.
He says: You need to look at both the longterm and short-term opportunities so that you
have plans in place based on your customer
insight and media analytics. Its no longer one or

the other, but asking agencies to work much

more integrated in your advertising.
Google has recognised this trend and the
company claims it provides tools to help
advertisers plan campaigns better. Dr Bhlmann
says this is because the future is hybrid, with
much more integrated advertising changing the
way we relate to brands.
Sinha agrees: We use a mixture of different
media for different lengths of time. But the
messaging remains constant and it talks to our
customers in a way that we were guilty of not
having thought of before.

Dont forget the

fundamental basics
Marketing is at risk of falling
lower down the list of company
strategies if CMOs or equivalent
directors do not change the way they approach
marketing strategies and make it part of the
everyday talk surrounding the company.
Dont forget the basic homework, says Zell.
For every product you put out there, think of
ways to cross-sell. Look to technology to push
promotions to a more superior level. Be that
product extensions or new variants, take a
pragmatic approach and do what you think is
right based on what consumers are telling you
they want.
Sinha adds: It sounds obvious, but so many
still forget. Its important to remember that your
customers are your lifeblood and you must use
your marketing to keep them involved right from
day one. If its wrong, rethink the strategies and
ensure that you have a competitive idea that will
keep you one step ahead of your competition.
Overall, a greater emphasis needs to be placed
on being customer-centric and using insight to
guide you through the basics.
Dr Bhlmann concludes: The tools are
available for anyone to keep up to date with the
habits of 21st century consumers, online and
offline. The key now is for CMOs to work with
this data.
Despite this advice, marketers are sure to be
under increasing pressure to make sure they
stick to all the commandments. Some of the

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recommendations about media neutrality and

agencies working together are likely to require
changes not just from brands themselves but
from their whole supplier infrastructure.
Leading executives from the agency world say
that while they agree with the ten
commandments in principle, CMOs need to
remember that actions speak louder than words
(see agency response, page 20).
Liam Byrne, chief secretary to the Treasury,
said last week that the biggest risk now to
economic recovery is complacency. If
marketers and agencies move into the last
few months of 2009 being aware of these ten
commandments whether they agree with
them or not they could certainly not be
accused of complacency. G

The Five Ms

m
m
m
m
m

ood is dependent on the company

atmosphere and openness to
creativity. Innovation will starve in
an environment closed to creativity.
indset is about the people around the
organisation. How do they approach
their work and embrace innovation?
echanisms. Focus on the devices
each organisation uses; what
technologies are available? How can
these devices be better utilised or
embraced to let innovation flourish?
easurement is an item often
overlooked be sure to establish a
measurement of success for
innovation. Dont limit yourself to a
quantitative approach; look for the
qualitative aspects as well.
otivation is more about selfawareness ask yourself: What are
you doing to lead innovation and
creativity?
Source: Prophet