The New Rules of Marketing at Google

September 7, 2016 at Google Campus, London

Supercharge your marketing!

Download a summary of my keynote The New Rules of Marketing

A new generation of businesses (new technologies, new business models, new leadership) is emerging to address a new generation of customers (new audiences, new geographies, new aspirations). Marketing exists to connect businesses and customers, in relevant and profitable ways.

A new approach to marketing is therefore required. Some of the new approaches, and maybe the language, will be familiar. But not all, and not joined up as a fundamental approach to driving business performance. Together, some call it Marketing 4.0 or Exponential Marketing, but whichever labels you apply, it involves a seismic shift in philosophy and practice.

It fundamentally challenges every marketer who still turns first to their strategic plan. And then to their advertising agency, or even their web developer. It is fundamentally digital in mindset, but human as well as technological. It demands analytical thinking, content and networks, but also vision and creativity. It requires new types of leaders, and a new mindset for every marketer. It is built around 7 transformations.

These are the new rules of marketing:

  • Growth Hacking … Forget strategic planning that is slow, structured and stable – instead think of strategy like a portfolio of fast and relentless experiments, seizing and shaping the best opportunities for growth. It still needs direction and choices – a vision still matters, making sense of change, having a clarity purpose, and a defined context in which to hack. Strategy becomes agile and creative, outside in, big ideas and small experiments, driven by changing markets and customer aspirations, rather than fixed by your own capabilities and products.
  • Customer Analytics … Forget mass-market segmentation, whether geographic, demographic or anything else. People are individual, and don’t want standardised solutions. The power of big data, connecting and interpreting, automating and exploiting – together with more qualitative and creative insights through customer immersion and “design thinking” – is used to focus, engage, customise, deliver, support, enable the right customers over time. Linking to the hack culture, is the ability to keep learning, about people, about yourself, and what works.
  • Platform Innovation … Forget innovation around a product, or even a service. Think strategically about how you can shape the market, in particular the platform that engages buyers and sellers, suppliers and distributors. Business model innovation, channel innovation, price innovation, then follow. Innovation is about shaping the market and all its dynamics to your advantage, whilst also personalised for each individual through micro-innovation – collaborative and customised solutions and experiences.
  • Brand Storytelling … Forget brands built around who you are – brand logos, slogans and ownership. People engage with brands about them, brands that reflect their aspirations, and brands that connect them with other people who share their values and aspirations. Brand stories are living fables, encouraged by the company, but interpreted and spread by people to people. Content must be realtime and relevant, and keep moving forwards. Encouraged but not controlled. Inspiring, human and memorable.
  • Social Influencers … Forget advertising, whether a TV campaign with 30 second slots, or even personalised mailings – people are not listening, and they don’t trust you. Instead they trust people like them, friends and peers. Word of mouth in a digital world, PR and celebrity endorsement is replaced by Instagramers or Youtubers who they trust. Brand stories, advocates, and community building help to guide and shape this influence.
  • Enabling Experiences … Forget customer experiences as a semi-automated series of incentivised touchpoints built around the “sale”, think instead from a customer’s perspective. Think about the experience they have – the outcomes, not the inputs, what they do not what you do. Which is usually more about how they use, apply and exploit the products and services which they buy, rather than the purchase itself. Use their language, think about their experience, and how they use, store, apply and even dispose of products and services. Enable them to achieve more.
  • Exponential Growth … Forget an obsession with sales volumes, even revenues, which are the short-term measure of sales people. Marketers should be focused on growing the business – profitably and sustainably – creating a better business future, and a long-term platform and guide for customers. Think profitably. Think growth. Think economic value creation. Exponential growth is now the expectation of investor, achieved by harnessing the power of branded networks, social influence and agile business models. Fast, exciting and rewarding.

These new rules of marketing, and specifically the 7 transformations, are the cornerstones of my next book and also of a new range of inspiring keynotes and practical workshops. We explore each mantra in detail, with detailed case studies together with the tools and partners for action.

Whilst of course, every market and every business is different, the 7 mantras are a provocative challenge for change. Of course, solutions are not black and white. Every business still has a mix of structured and hacked strategy, uses a box of earned and paid media, and has a balance of push and pull. But it is a rapidly changing area, a revolution.

Marketing is the driving force of business – it moves the business forwards, shapes the future, engages the customer and aligns the organisation to deliver. It is the growth engine, the innovation catalyst and customer champion. Markets are changing at incredible speed, requiring new agility and new capability.

There has never been a more exciting time for marketing, or to be a marketer.

Get started with Emarsys Live

I will be previewing these “new rules” for the first time at Google Campus in the forthcoming months, with a series of quarterly events in partnership with Emarsys, which is one of the companies helping you to embrace this new world. The ‘supercharger” marketing events are for CMOs to explore the best and next practices around, inspiring ideas and practical tools. They are fast and relaxed sessions to help you think different and explore what will work for you.

13:00 Registration
13:20 Welcome to Google – Belinda Tredwell, Manager Campus London
13:25 Supercharge your marketing … Allen Nance from Emarsys
13:30 Supercharge your future … Peter Fisk on “The New Rules of Marketing”
14:00 Supercharge your action … Alex Timlin on “Implementing CRM-based Advertising”
14:45 Coffee Break
15:00 Supercharge your results  … Martin Shaw on “Learning from Europe’s Top 500 Retailers”
15:45 Networking
16:00 Close
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Emarsys is a leading global provider of marketing automation software and the first marketing cloud for retail and e-commerce. The Emarsys B2C Marketing Cloud enables true, one-to-one interactions between marketers and consumers across all channels — building loyalty, enriching the customer journey and increasing revenues.  Machine learning and data science fuels customer intelligence in an intuitive, cloud-based platform enabling companies to scale marketing decisions and actions far beyond human capabilities. Founded in 2000, Emarsys data-driven platform helps more than 1,500 clients in over 140 countries to connect with their customers all over the world.

Emarsys focus on 5 stages of customer engagement:

  • Collect and merge your customer data in a single unified profile … Automate your data collection across all sources, from channels to behaviour, from CRM to offline data, building the richest overview of your customers. Create a single unified profile overview that connects and attributes interactions across all touchpoints to a single person.
  • Transform the raw data to intelligent powerful 1-to-1 marketing fuel … Transform your mountains of data into intelligent information with self-learning algorithms that analyse and reveal actionable insights.
    Automatically place your contacts in smart segments, calculate individual product affinities, and much more to truly understand he person behind the email address.
  • Automate messages and responses across the entire customer journey … Create relevant messages from the first hello throughout the whole customer lifecycle; then automate advanced programs to execute the right content response at the right time. Decide how to handle any scenario, and automate the response to keep your customers coming back for more.
  • Connect with customers using personalized messages across all channels … Orchestrate your marketing activities across all channels including Email, SMS, Push, Social Audiences and even offline to engage customers wherever they are active. Include product recommendations, conditional content, or smart segmentation, to automate the personalization of your content for beautiful content regardless of channel.
  • Truly understand your customers and gain unique insights for your strategy … The only actionable business intelligence marketing platform that scientifically lets you understand and target customers like never before.
    Highly focussed dashboards provide rich and detailed information that let you monitor any aspect of marketing performance and act on it with a couple of clicks.
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