Mike Urbonas – Product Marketing/Management and Business Intelligence Blog

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I recently read a great Ad Age article by Chris Kuenne, Four [Marketing] Talent Categories You Need to Win in a Connected World.  Recognizing that many marketing organizations still cling to discredited, “old school” marketing and PR, Chris Kuenne provided a timely description of the new talents, skills and attitudes found in today’s “new rules” marketing organizations that are actively contributing to company growth and success.

Chris Kuenne listed four skill categories vital for today’s successful marketing organization – Strategic, Analytic, Program Design and Technological – which, combined with talent-building marketing leadership, will yield well-orchestrated “personally relevant experiences” that “translate the brand promise into relevant and entertaining interactions that always seem fresh and new.”

To support his spot-on core point that “the old set of skills and conventional deployment will not work,” Chris Kuenne offered a sports analogy:

In [American] football, everyone is a specialist with a distinct position and responsibility. Each player goes one-on-one against his opponent, helping the team advance the ball in a linear fashion down the field. Marketing over the past 50 years reflected this linear approach, in which a brand’s marketing plan specified a highly planned, seldom altered, set of initiatives…Today marketing is closer to rugby. All players handle multiple roles, using many different skills…

Transformation through Innovation. Both football and today’s marketing function have benefited dramatically from innovation.  The one-on-one, seldom-altered, linear genre of football described by Chris Kuenne is an accurate description of the “smashmouth” version of the sport as it was played over a century ago, as exemplified by the feared Army football team and its predictable but brutal, physically punishing running game.

And so it went, until Notre Dame, in 1913, under new coach Jess Harper, unveiled an innovation that would thankfully transform the game: Notre Dame took unprecedented full advantage of the forward pass (!), recently legalized but widely ignored. Practiced that summer by quarterback Gus Dorais and offensive end and legend-to-be Knute Rockne, Notre Dame’s passing plays bewildered the Army defense for a lopsided 35-13 upset victory. (Of course, clever, daring plays unimaginable even a decade ago continue an ever-accelerating trend of innovation on the football field.)

It is amazing in hindsight that marketing has not experienced such dramatic transformation until recently. At roughly the same time as Notre Dame’s game-transforming forward pass innovation, John Wanamaker, the pioneer of the department store, made his famous remark, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”  Similar frustrations by marketers have continued on right up to present day!  Thankfully, marketing innovations today are replacing decades of plodding, seldom-altered, and maddeningly difficult to measure interruption marketing with a still-evolving paradigm of content marketing, permission marketing and marketing automation technologies. The marketing function is finally undergoing its own game-changing, “forward pass” of innovation and transformation. More >>

Improvisation. In the football game of an earlier era, the coach’s called play was the play, no matter how obviously ready the defense was ready for it. Today’s football calls for champion quarterbacks to decipher disguised defenses in real-time and “call an audible” – a quickly-improvised new play (Peyton Manning has turned this into part science, part theater). Teammates must also recognize the need to improvise a play as well: wide receivers must know when to “cut their route” and expect a very quick pass in response to an anticipated  rush on the quarterback. The defense must be ready to change its coverages at a moment’s notice as well. The old school coach’s “command and control” of a football game has given way to much more flexible play-by-play in response to real-time game situations. In similar fashion, members of winning marketing organizations are afforded the autonomy, and have the skills, to make real-time corrections during a marketing campaign or other activities, and do so collaboratively with others on the team.

An obsession for analytics. Today’s most effective professional teams – not just pro football, but baseball, basketball and hockey as well – are utilizing data analytics in ways and depths unimaginable even a decade ago, to predict future success on game day and optimize success off the field (demand-driven ticket prices, non game day function space usage, etc.).  Boston Globe Magazine provided an insightful report on the new, fast-growing career path of sports analytics, with grads with degrees in statistics, computer science, mathematics, etc.increasingly landing jobs in the front office of professional sport teams. Fascinating stuff, of direct relevance to all marketers:

It used to be that player evaluation and play calling relied heavily on subjective analysis…Instinct, experience, and very basic statistics like the box scores tracking a baseball player’s hits, strikeouts, and runs batted in per game drove decision making.

Now scores of new data points are available, letting team officials know the odds that one strategy will be more successful than another. Is it better to walk a particular player or pitch to him? To sign an aging all-star point guard to a single- or a multi-year contract? To punt, attempt a field goal, or try a running or passing play on a fourth down from the 50-yard line in a certain game situation? …Perhaps not coincidentally, Robert Kraft, whose family owns the Patriots, Red Sox owner John Henry, and the Celtics group all come from wildly successful business backgrounds, where number crunching is a way of life.

Celtics co-owner and venture capitalist Steve Pagliuca calls Boston “a new Florence” for sports analytics. A similar analytic renaissance now exists within marketing as well, led by sites such as Chief Marketing Technologist by Scott Brinker, whose excitement and enthusiasm for marketing analytics jumps off the page. I encourage you to visit Chief Marketing Technologist and start with one of Scott Brinker’s personal favorite posts, Rise of the Marketing Technologist and actively utilize marketing analytics in tandem with marketing automation and other key technologies. The active use of analytics is a force multiplier for effective marketing as it is for successful sport teams.

Leaders with proven acumen and leadership skills. Chris Kuenne provided advice to CMOs equally applicable to football coaches when he wrote that leaders “must encourage collaboration across radically different temperaments, skills and backgrounds.”  That’s an accurate description of football and marketing teams alike.  Equally important are the coach’s/CMO’s own qualifications: how many, how much of “hard skills” – the vital talents, skills and attitudes identified by Chris Kuenne – does the leader in question really possess? Has the coach/CMO demonstrated his or her “soft skills” – a proven ability to “attract, inspire and retain the best talent”? Coaches and marketing leaders alike can neither succeed nor even “get by” without these essential talents.

Put simply, authentic leaders, like champion coaches, attract and inspire highly talented professionals.  Poor coaches and poor business leaders repel talented people.

NFL fans will readily recall the Peter Principle-style failure of Minnesota Vikings coach Brad Childress, resulting in his high-profile firing during the 2010 season. Brad Childress’ implosion, summarized by Kevin Seifert of ESPN.com, should serve as a cautionary tale for those in any executive position who lack “new rules” acumen and leadership skills:

Childress had never been a head coach at any level. He had been the offensive coordinator of the highly successful Philadelphia Eagles, but coach Andy Reid called almost all of the plays over that period… [As Minnesota Vikings head coach] Brad Childress had a distant relationship at best with players, feuding with most key veterans at one point or another. And his schemes were uninspiring and rigid, routinely minimizing the skills of talented players…

Some successful coaches channel [New England Patriots coach] Bill Belichick, attempting to out-think and out-scheme opponents. Others emulate Bill Cowher [coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers for 15 seasons], whose motivational skills kept his teams playing hard… Childress didn’t fall in either category, and ultimately that’s why his players turned on him… They felt neither inspired nor challenged.

It’s as easy to recognize a winning, innovative marketing organization as it is to recognize a winning football team. Marketing organizations led by savvy, authentic leaders proactively gain business insight from customers, understand their challenges and needs, and translate that understanding into engaging, relevant solution content across new online communication avenues. They are the ones setting new rules for success.

On the other hand, marketing organizations with leadership that is inattentive to existing customers, blithely clinging to “old rules” marketing tactics, are the equivalent of NFL teams with one-dimensional play calling (otherwise known as “run, run, pass, punt”!) that lose games with embarrassing regularity.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 4th, 2011 at 7:52 pm and is filed under Interpersonal Skills, Marketing, Product Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.