More agility in marketing strategy takes the biscuit

THERE are many people I feel sorry for. Our national football coach for one, and his blind optimism in the face of perpetual adversity. Mauritania, for goodness’ sake. Apart from a surprisingly good national team, its only other boasts are a 3km-long train and a mountain made entirely of hematite (that’s iron ore for the geologically challenged).

And Thuli Madonsela, who wakes up every day waiting for another left-field onslaught from an aggrieved politician. I hope she does deep breathing and yoga and drinks wheatgrass.

And I feel sorry for marketing directors — those folk who are entrusted with navigating a brand through turbulent and adverse times when money is as tight as Mauritania’s defence and no one is properly engaging with your messaging because we’re saturated with everyone else’s and nothing remains in the brain’s limbic system longer than it takes Bafana Bafana to concede another goal in Nouakchott.

One hapless individual who spends his life immersed in a biscuit brand tells me he’s fantasised about creating one big brand moment, like donating a month’s stock to a needy cause and creating an artificial shortage, or hosting the country’s largest tea party, and then not doing anything else in the marketing space for 12 months.

He wonders if one big gesture would be more successful than all the other marketing collateral he has to steward because, as he put it, “no one is listening or watching anything I do anyway”. I told him he needed some alone time on Kediet ej Jill (the highest point in Mauritania).

But there is some light at the end of the tunnel for biscuit man and those like him, according to some who are getting it right. And, in no particular order, some scraps of wisdom I’ve picked up on my never-ending trawl for the secrets of brand success. One luminary says marketing managers don’t just need the ability to create compelling content these days, they need the ability to understand the overarching themes that connect a brand’s past, present and future. It’s when those strands meet in one seamless narrative that people will sit up and notice.

Marketers also need to learn a little maths. Research in the US says 48% of the marketing directors replaced in the past 18 months had analytics experience, while 80% of their replacements have worked with data and analytics. It’s an all-sums game these days, and, allied to that, marketing departments can no longer afford quarterly or monthly reviews of results.

Success these days means greater real-time response and more agility.

While the phrase “breaking down silos” has become a teethgrindingly awful cliché, a new report claims organisations that eliminate silos can improve revenue and customer satisfaction. So go and break them down with a hammer. And lest you think the soft stuff has been kicked into touch, clever marketers these days are able to mine all that data with one objective: providing even more personalised marketing and solutions for each client.

Or you could throw that tea party and see who comes.

Maggs is a broadcaster and writer and edits the RedZone marketing and brand website at www.financialmail.co.za/redzone