Marketing Management

The Corporate Executive Board had an eye-catching post on the HBR blog recently, Marketers Flunk the Big Data Test. They begin: The big-data explosion is driving a shift away from gut-based decision making. Marketing in particular is feeling the pressure to embrace new data-driven customer intelligence capabilities. No wonder a strong appetite for data is one of the most sought-after qualities in new marketers. And yet, a recent CEB study of nearly 800 marketers at …

Marketers are less statistical than, um, statisticians Continue Reading »

Three separate worlds: Paid media such as advertising and sponsorships. Earned media such as Facebook likes, Twitter tweets, search engine rankings, and every other review and comment that other people make about you. Owned media such as your web site, microsites, landing pages, mobile apps, your brand’s Facebook page, your YouTube channel, and so on. Well, for marketers they’ve been three separate worlds. Typical marketing org charts and agency/vendor boundaries sharply delineate these domains, often …

Mr./Ms. CMO — tear down these walls! Continue Reading »

Julie Schwartz, SVP of research for the Information Technology Services Marketing Association, shared some fascinating results from a recent survey on marketing transformation they conducted with the following companies: They asked marketers in these firms about a number of different roles — community manager, social engagement leader, chief content officer, data scientist, and chief technologist: Do you have this role now? Do you expect to have this role in the next 1-3 years? Do you …

25% of these firms have a chief technologist in marketing Continue Reading »

The problem with the Chicago school of economics isn’t so much its belief in rational decision-making — we can save for another day the computational complexity arguments against such precision in our thinking. Rather, it’s that it is too easy to misjudge what people are optimizing in their decisions. How many times have you looked at something a large organization does and remarked to yourself, “Yikes, that seems a little irrational.” The irony is that …

Godin’s hierarchy of business to business needs Continue Reading »

A headline on Forbes caught my eye the other day: Are CMOs the New CIOs? It cites the Gartner study following the money from IT to marketing and concludes (emphasis added is my own): The convergence between marketing and technology is undeniable, and it’s still in its infancy. Imagine a world where a brand’s success will ultimately come down to how well it can handle and leverage an infinite network of relationships and market interactions. …

CMOs are the new CIOs — crazy or prescient? Continue Reading »

I think a great marketing technologist should be part optimist, part pessimist. The optimist needs to indulge his or her imagination to drive the organization forward. To wonder, “what if?” To keep an open mind about new technologies and processes. To engage in the sort of creative free association and collaborative brainstorming that leads to innovation. And, most importantly, to be fearless in diving into the implementation of those ideas, making them real. The pessimist …

Marketing technologist: part optimist, part pessimist Continue Reading »

Awesome little essay by Andrew Chen from last week: Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing. As far as I’m concerned, you can almost perfectly substitute “growth hacker” with “marketing technologist,” as much of the rationale for this new breed of marketer is the same. Here’s his opening paragraph (emphasis added is my own): The new job title of “Growth Hacker” is integrating itself into Silicon Valley’s culture, emphasizing that coding and technical chops are …

Silicon Valley Marketing Technologists: Growth Hackers Continue Reading »

One of the other points that leaped out at me in the Econsultancy/Adobe report I discussed earlier this week — Are agencies hopelessly screwed or on the verge of a spectacular Renaissance? — was the increasing challenges of finding good technical talent. Under the heading “the tech talent time bomb,” the report cites research from McKinsey that claims: “By 2018, the United States alone could face a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep …

The tech talent time bomb in marketing Continue Reading »

Jonathon Colman, SEO marketer for REI, shared with me a deck he put together for ad:Tech, From an Army of 1 to Agile SEO Teams, which has some great insights on agile marketing. Here’s his deck: From an Army of 1 to Agile SEO Teams – adTech 2012 View more PowerPoint from Jonathon Colman At the end, he included a number of links to other resources on agile marketing (including this blog, thank you!). As …

HubSpot’s brilliant marketing organization structure Continue Reading »

There’s a punchline in there somewhere, but I’m partially serious. While everyone is coming around to the merging of marketing and technology/IT — and the value of hybrid roles to lead and operate at that intersection — the titles that people use for these roles vary tremendously. I like the phrase chief marketing technologist (a biased choice, I admit). My annual survey of marketing technology memes for 2012 favored the titles director of marketing technology, …

What do you call a marketing technologist? Continue Reading »