The What, How and YOU of the Future of Marketing
It’s a tenuous time to be a marketer. Many of the strategies that have worked 3 years ago are no longer relevant. What do you need to know to succeed in the marketing world of tomorrow?
We have been fortunate to have an opportunity to get insights from Professor Andrew Stephen, L’Oréal Professor of Marketing & Associate Dean of Research, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, reflecting on marketing in the ever-changing digital age and hearing his vision of how to adapt to be successful.
Andrew is one of the leading academic experts on social media marketing, and is continuously working on projects aimed at deepening our understanding of many aspects of digitized and socialized consumption.
Is “Marketing 4.0” just another buzzword? What is it all about?
The term “Marketing 4.0” is the title of a book written by the marketing guru Philip Kotler that came out in late 2016. In that book, Kotler and his coauthors talk about the “new” marketing being “moving from traditional to digital.”
I think that’s fine but maybe by now in 2018 an outdated perspective. This is because it suggests that marketing wasn’t previously digital, and of course it was. I think all marketing — digital or otherwise — now must be seen as “just marketing” using different channels and forms of content and messaging depending on the types of products and who you’re trying to reach.
I’ve long held the view that we shouldn’t see digital as a separate thing, and it should just be part of an integrated approach to marketing. This is something I noticed that L’Oréal’s CMO for Western Europe, Stéphane Berube, has also recently been speaking about.
What are the three key strategic priorities of marketing in 2018?
I would say the top 3 strategic priorities for marketing in 2018 are as follows:
- Find a way to be not just customer centric, but human centric. This means that marketing strategies need to consider not only customers’ needs and delivering superior value to customers, but also about the other people involved — most commonly your employees, but this can also extend to business partners, suppliers, retailers, etc.
The point is that marketing should at the heart focus on the people, which has to include customers but a customer centricity leaves out all the other people involved, and they make a difference.
2. Work out how to use technology and data in value creating and sensible ways. Marketing technology is a big deal, as it should be. But investing in technology and collecting customer data without having strong use cases in mind is perilous.
Brands must have clear plan for how the technology can add value to the customers and the company. Data can play a big role in transforming your relationships with customers, for example, but you need to do it properly.
3. Understand new and changing digital media channels with respect to how they work and when they will be effective vs not. There’s always new ways to reach and interact with consumers, particularly in the digital media space.
Too often, however, marketing tends to jump in and hope for the best with new media. Instead, given economic pressures to be efficient, marketers should try to work out what works vs doesn’t work in all key media channels in a systematic, data-driven manner.
What is the role brand advocacy plays today?
This can be hugely important. I’ve always believed that strong brand advocacy — customers who are willing to spread positive word of mouth and advocate on your behalf — is a very important marketing “asset” and one that can be cultivated. The importance of advocacy is that it can obviously help bring new customers in, and research has shown that new customers who are referred in by a customer advocate tend to be more valuable in the long term.
However, the sometimes-forgotten benefit of advocacy is also that it helps retain the customers who are the advocates — if they are out there talking positively about your brand to their friends, it makes it harder for them to leave your brand and switch.
So advocacy is both an acquisition and a retention mechanism.
What are five key skills that every marketer needs to possess to be able to succeed today?
(i) Openness to new things. Marketers have to be agile in how they adapt.
(ii) A commitment to lifelong learning and a willingness to unlearn old skills when they become less relevant or useful.
(iii) Data savvy. Marketers can be techie or not, but no matter what, they have to have some level of fluency with data and analytics.
(iv) A passion for customers and customer insights. They need to deeply care about their customers and want to understand everything possible about their customers so that they can serve them better
(v) Creativity and innovative thinking. Marketers still need to be creative thinkers, even in a data-driven, technology-enabled world. But creativity and innovative thinking now and into the future doesn’t necessarily mean things like dreaming up creative ad campaigns. It can mean finding ways to use technology in innovative ways to solve customers’ problems, or looking for creative solutions to market-focused business challenges.
Which aspects have you noticed students are most interested today when it comes to marketing?
The main one that we have noticed at the Saïd Business School at Oxford is a desire for students in marketing to become much more fluent in marketing analytics and related aspects of data science.
We don’t expect our business/marketing students to become hard-core data science experts, and they don’t expect that either. But they want to know as much as they can about marketing analytics so that they can be better data-driven marketing managers. They also want to know what machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques are in marketing analytics, so that they can understand the technical experts when they are working alongside them.
And in addition to bigger picture, strategic topics, they also want to develop some very tactical digital marketing skills — which we have been offering now for 2 years as an online training program in conjunction with General Assembly.
Which of the skills can be taught effectively via online systems and other nontraditional settings?
I am a firm believer in face-to-face, real-time learning as I think it is necessary for many topics. Having discussions facilitated by an expert, and back-and-forth debates among students provides a lot of learning value when trying to cover the big-picture, typically complex, and strategic topics in marketing. But this needn’t always be in a physical classroom.
At Oxford we’re experimenting now, for instance, with a virtual lecture theatre that allows for about 80 students to connect from anywhere in the world for a real-time class with a lecturer.
Not everything needs to be real-time, though. A lot of self-paced learning can be really effective. I think it is best suited when people need to cover some material and make sure they have reached a certain level of knowledge and understanding. In my marketing analytics course at Oxford for our MBA students, for example, a lot of the jargon and basic technical knowledge is covered through a series of self-paced online modules (videos of me explaining concepts combined with self-assessment quizzes and written learning guides for future reference). This brings everyone up to a certain level of understanding, and then we build on that in real-time class sessions with workshop activities, experiential learning, and discussions. This “blended” or “hybrid” approach, I think, brings together the best of both worlds.
What are the skills that one cannot learn from university education, that you think will be highly valued by companies?
I’d love to be able to say that everything can be learned from university but of course it cannot! The truth is that skills, mindsets, etc learned at university need to be applied. Some of that application can happen while in school (e.g., through real projects collaborating with companies, case competitions, experiential learning), but there’s great value in “learning in practice” once working.
I also think skills like how to learn, build, and navigate informal networks within a corporation (essential for effective collaboration and longer-term career success) cannot be taught in a classroom. They need to be experienced and learned through trial and error. Same goes for some very industry-specific skills — universities won’t have a business degree that teaches you only what you need for the beauty industry, for instance.
So on-the-job training, learning and development is needed to build up industry-specific knowledge and expertise.
Some may say that if you specialize too heavily on digital, you might end up being an expert in one particular domain only, reducing your chances of a broader scope to become Chief Marketing Officer. What is your take on this?
I disagree. If you look at successful CMOs (in L’Oréal around the world, as well as in other companies) they have all embraced digital. Some have been digital experts themselves, others have digitally transformed their organisations and their own expertise too. I think specialization is important earlier in one’s career — you need to be able to do something (of value and relevant) really well.
Being a subject matter or domain expert is important. But as one’s career advances they need to quickly expand the scope of their knowledge and develop new skills that allow them to augment their prior specialization.
This is what lifelong learning is about, and it fundamentally boils down to being adaptive and open to new ideas.
What surprises you most about L’Oréal when it comes to digital transformation?
I have studied L’Oréal’s digital transformation over the last few years, and spoken to many people within L’Oréal at different levels who have been involved in the strategizing and implementation. And it seems like it is an ongoing task, which makes sense to me. In general, I think L’Oréal is truly a leader, not just in its industry but across industries, when it comes to successful digital transformation.
I guess the biggest “surprise” to me has been that a company as large, complex, and old as L’Oréal has managed to undergo successful digital transformation in a relatively short period of time. This has required visionary leadership from the C-suite, particularly the Chief Digital Officer Lubomira Rochet, and a lot of ambitious hard work throughout the organisation. It is impressive.
What would be your advice for young marketers venturing into marketing?
Marketing is a very exciting and rapidly evolving field right now. Embrace the fast pace of change, keep your eyes open for new things to learn, and remember that even though the world is increasingly becoming automated, marketing at its heart is about people.
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