A Digital Leadership Vacuum

A Digital Leadership Vacuum

There once was a company with a proud brand. They talked about how to strengthen the brand, how to promote the brand, and how to leverage the brand.

When I asked how they measured the efficacy of his “branding,” they had no answer. They ran no focus groups regularly. They polled no customers. They held no internal meetings to develop a measurement methodology. They could not rattle off three “brand attributes” regarding the brand.

What they thought was brand was all in their heads; what they thought made no direct impact on sales; what they thought made no direct impact on revenue. Their emotional attachment to what they defined as brand clouded the objectivity of what a brand should be about. It clouded the fact that a brand is a promise of an experience. It clouded the fact that a brand should mean something not only to the “end users” of a product or service, but also to partners, employees, investors, vendors, competitors. Yes, other stakeholders.

The survey capabilities they employed were manual – printed questionnaires and postage – while their audience was spread over the globe. They did minimal advertising. They agonized over the granularity of marketing communications pieces used, frustrating the marketing managers and creative people. They insisted on using specific colors and types of fonts, without any empirical evidence justifying those choices.

They had oversaw a seven-figure trade show budget but set forth no goals for each trade show and therefore had no measurements in place to determine ROI. There were no public relations strategies or goals to speak of.

Oh, by the way, this thing called the Internet came along…and up popped competitors that were outpacing the older brand. The company did not have the data infrastructure to handle the growing volume of data that needed to come in and out of it. They said they wanted better visibility into the sales pipeline and then scoffed at the idea of having to pay for a CRM tool. They couldn’t spell EMM or MRM if it had to save their lives.

The whole purpose of this entry and subsequent blogs is to introduce a concept, that’s already been introduced, but ignored by a legion of “marketers.” It’s data-driven Marketing. I have coined it “Net-Centric Marketing,” or “C4ISR Marketing.” Basically, it’s about the imperative that to be successful in Marketing today, the professional must be technically savvy more than ever before and use a growing array of tools.

I like all those phrases and want to share their underlying concept with you over the course of my blogging. My nom de plume is “The Marketing Consigliere,” and I will refer to myself in the third person.

Tune in. Blog on. And don’t get caught with your digital pants down.

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