Looking For A Picture Of Marketing

Having worked as a marketer for a while, it can still be a challenge to paint a picture of how all the parts of marketing work together. If you’ve got a strong visual model that makes sense of marketing, and how the parts work together, I’d be thrilled to see it.

I’d like such a picture because I often get asked questions like, how advertising works with public relations? And, if they’re both managed by a communications department? Or, how do community management and promotions interface? Are these both parts of customer relationship management? And, where does word of mouth marketing fit in?

These are all valid, and important questions that deserve an answer. I think a picture would help people pull apart the departments from the activities. I also think it would help people avoid thinking only in terms of departmental hierarchies, which are usually the organizational imperative. While hierarchies are a reality, marketing often works best when a set of roles check and balance each other. More like a heterarchy in a hierarchy:

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I’m writing this post because I have yet to find the picture I’m looking for. I’ve already written about how going to the marketing page on Wikipedia won’t help sort any of this out. It’s sad that marketers don’t have their shit together enough to put up a decent page about themselves where these kinds of questions can be answered.

Though I have not yet drawn a picture of my own, I have explored a behavioral approach to the problem that could serve as the basis for such a visualization. I’ve tried to forget about what we call the parts of marketing and to simply think about what actually needs to get done. Perhaps the next step will be to connect each of these activities to a role within a company.

  • Research the marketplace and who/what is there: (market research)
    • define market boundaries
    • inventory segments, demographics, sentiment, messaging, positions, pricing, practices, etc
  • Analyze & report on the state of the market: (business intelligence)
    • identify opportunity spaces, overlap, gaps, adjacencies, similarities, differences, trends, and patterns.
    • package marketing intelligence for distribution within the organization
    • advocate for customer satisfaction.
  • Foster community engagement: (marketing communications)
    • package and distribute information to empower community (internal and external)
    • develop and maintain a foundation for managing customer relationships
    • develop and maintain a platform to support ongoing conversations/research with community
  • Ensure findability: (public relations / advertising)
    • participate in communities where there is interest in your organization’s products or services
  • Innovate products and services (product marketing)
    • design products and services based on marketing opportunities and customer input
  • Manage brand assets and knowledge: (knowledge management / community relationship management)
    • maintain, and make accessible, brand assets to support positioning
    • ensure consistent experience across touch-points

Twitter Digest

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Have a great weekend.

Why Customer Service Is Moving To The Cloud

People used to pick up the phone to call “the experts” in customer service. The major innovations there have been about using technology to make knowledge accessible to these experts and to cut costs. The latter effort has been the most effective part and the cost savings have been far greater than the improvements in customer satisfaction.

The result is that people now try Google before picking up the phone. Communities spring up around products and services and often answer questions better than the experts. That’s because customers have more experience using products than customer service does. And, this fits well with my belief that communities own brands, not companies.

Now that communities are helping themselves, how can companies add value and help out? They have to listen to the conversations in the cloud (i.e. all the communities), harvest the insights, and report them back to the community so they’re easy to find using tools like Google. The problem has been that the call centers and internal customer service operations have been siloed from the communities. That’s changing.

I hate to sound like poster boy from Salesforce, but they’ve figured out how to connect internal knowledge bases to communities through cloud services. That’s what my previous post was about here. Now that they’re well on their way to cracking that nut, they’re gotten better at explaining why the Saas (software as a service) model is uniquely suited to this environment. Here’s a great video they put together that explains it better than I can:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ae_DKNwK_ms

Emergence + Crowdsourcing = Insight

Emergence and crowdsourcing seem like good bedfellows. Here’s why I think they belong together.

Emergence

This term was originally coined in 1875 by the pioneer psychologist G. H. Lewes, and his conception is based on the idea that many things that occur in nature are the result of the sum of two or more things, or the difference between them. Basically addition or subtraction. Based on this, t it should be possible to trace back the calculations, and thus define a basis for predict future outcomes. With emergence, however, Lewes states that the above theory does not apply. Here, outcomes are not simply the result of the sum, or difference, of inputs.

This reminds me a of the 1+1=3 rule that I talk about in this post. I think of emergence as the manifestation of a system’s properties that are not anticipated from the properties of its components or parts. To put it another way,  emergence happends when forces interact in such a way as to produce unexpected patterns, or structures, in nature. Ants are commonly used as an example of insects exhibiting emergent behavior because they seem to “think as a colony” rather than as individuals (i.e. the group is smarter than the individual). Each ant appears to act out simple and predictable behaviors, but together they build massive structures that embody a pattern, or plan, that appears to be greater than the sum of it’s parts.

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is simply taking as task that would have been done by one person, or a small group of people, and outsourcing it to a community of people. Depending on the kind of problem, this approach can offer greater efficiency and improved quality of the work product. The difference between crowdsourcing and outsourcing is simply that there is no defined party or community that can take on the work. It should also be noted that crowdsourcing is not the same as open-source, which is more about making the plans for something available to a community to alter. With crowdsourcing, a data set being worked on can remain proprietary and individuals may, or may not, be able to share information.

One benefit of crowdsourcing is that it may increase the diversity of approaches that are used to resolve the problem. There can also be greater efficiency in the allocation of resources through the use of competitions. In this case, the amount and quality of work produced internally for X dollars may be less than the amount and quality of work produced in sum by many people/groups working for a prize of X dollars.

Putting It Together

My favorite story that ties these two ideas together follows an experiment conducted by Francis Galton back in the late 1800’s. I first learned about this story from James Surowiecki’s Wison of Crowds, which uses the story in it’s opening. Galton basically went to a market and offered an open challenge to guess the weight of an ox. Hundreds of people guessed, including some experts. Despite the large number of estimates, nobody guessed the weight within a pound. What Galton discovered, however, was that by taking all the guesses and averaging them he could estimate the weight within the required margin. In other words, the crowd is an excellent estimating mechanism for weighing ox, even though no of the individuals participant had any idea that they were working together.

I find these ideas inspiring and am always looking for ways to bring them together to solve problems from customer service to product development. I actually view writing this blog as a way of participating in a project to overhaul marketing that is much bigger than any individual. Together with my fellow marketing bloggers, we are slowly transforming what it means to be a marketer.  I hope you’ll join me in this effort and that together we can define a new discipline.