7 Reasons Marketers Are Not Innovating Fast Enough

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This article is by Mark DiMassimo, chief of DiMassimo Goldstein.

“Follow the money.” – Deep Throat

You know this. You talk about the new realities of social, mobile, video, content, and the advisability of restructuring to seize these them – but, what are you doing about it?

We marketers are choking on talk. Today, each of us is a brand, competing to interest an audience with millions of content options. It’s an audience with a short attention span and a bottomless appetite for the new. So, we exhale our idea-rich content. We talk the talk.

The result is a conversation that has gotten far ahead of the reality of most marketing organizations. Meanwhile, examples of fundamental restructuring to adjust to these new realities are few and far between.

So, why so much talk and so little do?

In my experience working with fast-moving, innovative companies, I’ve seen CMOs face the following top roadblocks to doing:

1.      Follow The Money. As a CMO, you’re measured on the efficiency of your marketing spend. When you set aside dollars for innovation, the immediate result is a decrease in efficiency. As a result, you often doom tests with inadequate funding and too-tight timelines. Under pressure to justify your experiments, you may place too high a burden of proof on new programs – often higher than you apply to your more traditional expenditures. All of this is a recipe for delay, failure and, ironically, inefficiency. A quarter of a year like this, and your conservatism is likely to be reinforced.

2.      New Realities, Old Structure. This whole budgeting problem is accentuated by the structure of most organizations, in which the CMO runs marketing and someone else runs the development of the product or service. This can be a director of engineering, the head of product management, a development leader or other title, depending on industry. This structure developed when the role of marketing was to sell the product that the company chose to make. Of course, that isn’t the world we work in today. So, who should fund the budget for innovation? We delay while we try to figure that out.

3.      One Little Letter (CEO vs CMO). There is enormous tension between the CMO and the CEO on these issues. The CMO may perceive the CEO to be sending mixed messages. On one hand, the CEO expects significant gains in marketing efficiency. On the other hand, s/he is enormously impatient to see evidence of a new model in marketing. Does your CEO watch TED Talks and viral marketing videos? If so, you are likely in this vise. If not, this is a good time to start getting ready for the new CEO.

4.      Chickens Eating Eggs. The challenge with the budget ends up being a chicken and egg conundrum. You can’t budget because you can’t project. And you can’t project because there are no tests from which to safely extrapolate. If the efficacy could be proven, the money would be there. But without the money, the efficacy cannot be proven. In this scenario, the chickens are eating the eggs. Until that changes, the future of chickens is in doubt.

5.      The Fog of Novelty. There’s a novelty bonus in marketing that can be huge. The first time a brand – Oreo, for example – does something novel and promising, such as live tweeting the Super Bowl, they get so much more than a bump in engagement and brand energy. They get to own a story that becomes one of the guiding parables of social marketing. Opportunists, entrepreneurs and agencies will further hype the innovation, adding to the noise and uncertainty. Deep down, the marketer knows that these results can’t be extrapolated into an ongoing program. Starting a bandwagon is much more profitable than jumping on one. So, what to do?

6.      Too Much Change to Manage. There was a time when the innovations arrived like babies, one at a time, and only occasionally in twos or more. That couldn’t be further from the way things are today. While undoubtedly there is a huge amount of hype obscuring the true story of innovation, I do not doubt that that true story exists. I have helped my clients upend entire industries. The old certainties really are in doubt. There are so many real, immediate and urgent changes to manage, you have little time for speculation or for planning ahead.

7.      The Hole In The Org Chart. My mission is to close the gap between the CMO and the CEO. One approach is to create a new C-level position encompassing both product and marketing – The Chief Growth Officer. The business of business is growth, and organic growth will be the Chief Growth Officer’s mandate. Marketing insight will better inform the development of the product or service, helping change leaders to penetrate the fog of novelty to perceive what is really important to audiences. Which in turn will create more decisive advantages for marketing to promote. The conversation will then be truly a two-way conversation, not just about trivialities but about fundamental things. The budget bifurcation will be mediated by a single manager.

At least one of my client organizations has adopted this model, and one of the first unexpected windfalls has been a goldmine of content. The product development organization had been sitting on a mountain of news of true interest to customers and other publics as well. And the product people are beginning to seek out the insight of marketers. It’s really helped.

The organization has gotten so interested in its own users and so fired up about creating the future of its industry that its outward expressions have become much more searching, mission focused and realistic.

With the doers and the talkers working together in an integrated way, the audience perceives a very different company. NPS scores and tracking study results show it. Marketplace results do too. In a word, what these publics perceived is a company that is doing it for real.

Short of getting promoted or reorganizing your company, here are some things you can do to lead your organization to more successful marketing innovation:

First off, call it what it is: Innovation.

Something magical happens when you change the label. Sit down with your CEO, your key colleagues, your team and say this, “What we are doing here is different from what we often do. We’re trying to innovate, and innovation really is different.”

It doesn’t sound like much, does it? But it works like magic, because it makes people pause and think. It makes them question their assumptions. It opens them up. It prepares them for the very real commitments involved in innovating.

Second, decide between one large experiment and many small ones. Early viral marketing success eluded most marketers. But some early winners changed the game when they realized that the results of any one effort were too hard to predict, so they would instead play a numbers game. OfficeMax OMX NaN%funded twenty simultaneous, relatively small experiments with then agency, Toy. “Elf Yourself” was one of those experiments and its success more than paid for the innovation effort, as it lived and engaged for years to come.

Third, take a realistic look at how you measure and budget for more traditional marketing programs and channels and then commit to setting an equal or lower standard for innovations. If you are like most marketers, you’ll find a lot of ambiguity and doubtful relevance in your measurements for your mainstay programs. Focus your skepticism and perfectionism there rather than on the new, and you’ll buck the trend of too-slow evolution.

English: This is a picture of Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Finally, celebrate the things you actually do! More experiments mean more brand energy, which in itself can be a game changer. And revolutions can start with almost invisible little changes. Google GOOGL +0.65%started with a slightly faster search bar. Zappos took off after two-way free shipping. Oreo didn’t plan a mid-game blackout, just a little experiment in creative live tweeting. Dollar Shave Club couldn’t afford to pay for advertising, so they did a funny video, which is still the core of their direct response advertising program.Netflix NFLX +4.93% thought, “Never a late fee.” Uber founders were willing to pay more not to have to wait for a cab.

Sure, you might miss some posting, tweeting, pinning and general opining while you’re working on your experiments. On the other hand, it won’t be long before you have real accomplishments to talk about.

Here’s to less talk and more do!