I love marketing because it is a perfect marry between science and art for a person like me that have a balance left and right brain. I have been fortunate to have worked as professional marketer in different industries and companies for over twenty years that provide me wide arrays of marketing challenges and experiences.
This article is a summary of my online marketing class with Andi Djoewardi, CMO Ninja Express, as guess speaker in mid-December 2020.
Self-Centred Leading to Silo Mentality
Andi started the class by sharing his first challenges as marketing leader: with the “current” marketing organization driven by the emerging start-up setting and majority of late Gen Y and Gen Z team composition. They show similar characteristics: super energic and resourceful but tend to self-centred. They are on fire and excited by new things but often overlooked that they need to collaborate to make things happen. Moreover, often these are found: they are not clear about problems at hand, despite of aware of where and how to get the answers, they are busy among themselves, and the problem solving is exclusive — not thorough and integrated.
Using the framework introduced by Simon Dolan in his article “Coaching by Values: Entrepreneurship and Care”, I went through the management development in different eras:
· Management by Instructions (MBI); with less competition and companies are initially protected by regulations, hence management rules by instructions. Bosses give orders.
· Management by Objectives (MBO); competition arises, companies set key performance indicators (KPIs) and cascade from top to bottom. Managers act like administrators that check if KPIs are met.
· Management by Values (MBV); quality and speed become super important. Managers should empower team members to solve some problems themselves with emerging demand from customers and the flatter organization.
Self-centred character leads to silo mentality becomes common in many organizations. This is formed by individuals that consistently show poor personal behaviours or blind spots, incubated into team or group, and reinforced by poor organizational design.
In the era of MBV, the concept “Leader as Coach” is introduced. Marketing leaders need to lead by value: more “ask and listen” then “show and tell”, specially towards the young marketers that have generation gap with them. Unfortunately, in the field, I still hear a lot of marketing leaders deny this and want to keep their way to lead their team. Coaching is misinterpreted as only for non-performers. Coaching is mis-matched with mentoring or counselling. Coaching is seen slow burn to make impact. Those limiting beliefs about coaching should be demolished for marketing leaders to be successful in this department that is vital for the future.
Silo mentality can be addressed through individual and group coaching by hacking the individual’s journey, creating fellowship amongst them, and then build shared accountability.
Jumping into WHAT
Andi then shared his second challenges on young millennials and Gen Z that often jump into WHAT when getting tasks. They are connected, creative, and confident. However, they miss out the most important thing in the task: understanding what the problem is, what problems they are trying to solve. For example, when they need to create communication campaign to support new product launching. They directly jump into conclusion that they need to make TV campaign and put a lot of billboards. Another example is when they need to address the issue where customers know about their product, but the product is not in top consideration. They directly jump into conclusion to simply use celebrity — or many celebrities.
I refreshed with Simon Sinek’s The Golden Circle. Always start with WHY. Do not directly jump into WHAT. In first example, why do we need to launch the new product? By understanding that, marketing will be able to help business and approach the campaign to core target customers answering their needs within the business framework. In second example, by understanding the story behind the brand funnel, marketing can really work on addressing the real issues and creating the right campaign to increase marketing RoI (Return on Investment).
However, this is easy to say than to do. Building a habit to start with WHY is a must for marketing leaders nowadays. It took me a few months of discipline to do so, so you must be able to do the same.
Brand vs Performance Marketing
Andi brought up another challenges he is facing being young and raised up in instant era, with digital seems to be the answer of everything, the young marketers expect things to turn around quickly and get the result asap.
Unfortunately, we are dealing with human as customers and it takes weeks — event months or years to change human’s behaviours for non-daily routine activities.
First and foremost, I do not quite understand why there is dichotomy between brand and performance marketing. As old school marketers, raised as FMCG marketer that was comfortable and used to work alone doing A-Z managing my brand(s), it is our (brand managers’) accountability to ensure the assigned brand meet the business and brand objective. True (FMCG) marketers know what it takes to be brand managers. It is not just about brand popularity in the market but also business performance. It is not just about creative awards and recognition but also market share and brand equity.
The lack of discipline or performance measure to track marketing RoI may penalize brand marketing vs performance marketing at the beginning. Performance marketing can easily show some measures quickly, but marketers must be careful if the measures are really the right measure to track marketing performance.
With covid-19 pandemic restricting people’s movement and crowd, some traditional channels like out-of-home branding and events become less effective and digital channel becomes first option to move the investment into. This leads into crowd digital channel, reducing efficiency and may be also the effectiveness.
With that, the talks about dichotomy become more intense.
My stand is that the dichotomy should not even exist. Marketing in all organizations should be positioned as the core of business. Marketing is not mere supporting function. After all, marketing is about building relationship with customers. But indeed, all marketing leaders should invest more on creating new mindset about how important marketing shows impact to business but always balance between long term and short term goals, hence balancing brand and performance marketing (if we still keep this dichotomy). For me, it’s brand marketing with performance. Marketers must be able to justify why marketing activities or campaigns exist. And that is the reason why silo mentality and jumping to WHAT behaviours must be abolished.
Further info
To discuss more about how marketing leaders need to create new set of mindset and behaviors for themselves and their team, contact me at coachmed@medikoazwar.com.
