Tom Fishburne

“Marketing Babble” - new cartoon and post on “Jargon-Monoxide Poisoning” https://lnkd.in/gMMU_uiJ

I recently heard the way marketers speak described as “Jargon-Monoxide Poisoning,” which made me laugh.

I think “Jargon-Monoxide” is produced by every part of a business, but marketers are particularly adept at “Jargon-Monoxide Poisoning.” It’s ironic that the business discipline in charge of communications has such a hard time communicating what it does without jargon.

There are multiple varieties of “Jargon-Monoxide” — from overly technical acronyms like the ones in this cartoon to technical buzzwords to the rainbows-and-unicorns poetry that often comes out in conversations on brand purpose.

The first time I realized I was guilty of “Jargon-Monoxide Poisoning” happened as a marketer of a yogurt brand, visiting a manufacturing facility in a rural part of Michigan. After a tour, we took turns presenting parts of our marketing plan to different shifts coming straight from the production lines. Much of the language we used regularly in the marketing ivory tower back at headquarters fell flat.

To be more effective, marketers need to remove themselves from the silo of marketing and learn the speak the languages of everyone else. This is important across the whole span of the organization — from the factory floor to the board room.

I like this insight I stumbled across from former Aetna CMO David Ogilvy:

“If the CFO wants to talk about return to shareholders and the CMO is talking about number of followers, you’ve got a communications problem. If the CEO wants to talk about business strategy and the CMO wants to talk about TV advertising campaigns, you have a communications issue. CMOs need to become fluent in the language of strategy business goals, business KPIs, return on sales, and business ROI if they want to have the influence they should be able to exert in the C-suite.”

But the main antidote to “Jargon-Monoxide Poisoning” is just re-learning how to speak like actual humans.

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“Brands on Threads” - new cartoon and post https://lnkd.in/giHhZPep

Meta debuted their own version of Twitter a couple weeks ago called Threads. The launch created a fire drill for many a marketing team, deciding whether to jump in and if so, in what way.

Part of the alarm was caused by the record user growth of the app. At 100 million users in five days (certainly aided by the tight integration with Meta’s Instagram), Threads even passed ChatGPT’s meteoric rise as the fastest growing app of all time. Plus it had the backing of Meta, which boasts three of the top five most used apps: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. And ad spend on Threads competitor Twitter has already been down 59% in the US.

Many brands jumped on the bandwagon. Nine of the top ten retailers activated their Threads accounts, along with brands from Nike to Reese’s to Amazon. This from a standing start with organic posts only and no branded content tools.

And yet, just because brands have joined the party doesn’t mean that people will want anything to do with them. Or even that the party will continue. Already the Threads platform has experienced a 70% drop in daily active users and a 50% reduction in time spent on the app.

As Clara Murray at Raconteur put it:

“Social networks, to be of any use at all, need to be a place where people actively choose to spend time and not just a forum for advertisers.”

Threads is a good example of the type of opportunity that constantly comes along in marketing. Brand teams have to assess whether and how to take action.

A good rule of thumb is to understand the difference between “reacting” and “responding”. Some marketing teams constantly “react” to new opportunities — immediately and instinctively jumping on every shiny new thing.

Other teams “respond” by deciding first how or even if the opportunity can advance their strategy in a meaningfully unique way.

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“Impact of ChatGPT” - new cartoon and post https://lnkd.in/gehFWYjS

Salesforce recently found that 67% of senior IT leaders are pushing to adopt generative AI across their businesses in the next 18 months, with one-third naming it their top priority.

At the same time, a majority of these senior IT leaders have concerns about what could happen. Among other reservations, the report found that 59% believe generative AI outputs are inaccurate and 79% have security concerns. 

In adopting generative AI, organizations are simultaneously pushing the accelerator to the floor while trying to work on the engine at the same time. This urgency without clarity is a recipe for missteps.

A nonprofit eating disorder organization called NEDA found this out recently after replacing a 6-person helpline team and 20 volunteers with a chatbot named Tessa..

A week later, NEDA had to disable Tessa when the chatbot was recorded giving harmful advice that could make eating disorders worse.

I once spoke at a digital transformation summit hosted by Procter & Gamble. One of their attorneys talked about the challenge of balancing urgency with safeguards in a time of digital transformation. She shared a model that stuck with me about providing “freedom within a framework.”

BCG Chief AI Ethics Officer Steven Mills recently advocated for a “freedom within a framework” type of approach for AI. As he put it:

“It’s important folks get a chance to interact with these technologies and use them; stopping experimentation is not the answer. AI is going to be developed across an organization by employees whether you know about it or not…

“Rather than trying to pretend it won’t happen, let’s put in place a quick set of guidelines that lets your employees know where the guardrails are … and actively encourage responsible innovations and responsible experimentation.”

One of the safeguards that Salesforce suggests is “human-in-the-loop” workflows. Two architects of Salesforce’s Ethical AI Practice, Kathy Baxter and Yoav Schlesinger, put it this way:

“Just because something can be automated doesn’t mean it should be. Generative AI tools aren’t always capable of understanding emotional or business context, or knowing when you’re wrong or damaging.

“Humans need to be involved to review outputs for accuracy, suss out bias, and ensure models are operating as intended. More broadly, generative AI should be seen as a way to augment human capabilities and empower communities, not replace or displace them.”

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“5 Stages of Price Promotions” - new cartoon and post https://lnkd.in/g8FTC6eQ

“Price promotions are a drug. They are the crack cocaine of marketing. I hope we’ve seen an end to the senseless promotions that we’ve seen.”

Les Binet, group head of effectiveness at adam&eveDDB, shared these thoughts at last year’s IPA’s Global Effectiveness conference.

Much of the spike in sales that brands see during a price promotion subsidizes consumers who would have bought anyway — time-shifting or moving from other sales channels.

Nielsen reports that a whopping 84% of price promotions are unprofitable. As Les put it, “if you keep doing it, you increase your price sensitivity, reduce your pricing power and erode your margins.”

Pressure to run price promotions can be intense, particularly in an inflationary climate. Retailers push hard for the brands they carry to run increasingly steep or frequent price promotions. Competitive brands can accelerate a race to the bottom And once brands are used to high levels of promotional volume, it’s very hard to back off.

Mark Ritson described the doom loop that can result:

“Eventually, brands reach a rock bottom where promotional pricing becomes the norm. Selling at the recommended retail price becomes a minority activity. Many organizations then begin to cut quality, because their RRP is now another more than a bluff and their average selling price, many percentage points lower, now demands a lesser quality of construction for any profit to be possible.”

Mark recently explored the strategic reset that the Tyrrells brand of crisps had to take to break their price promotions doom loop.

“Most organizations develop a promotional addiction because of an over-emphasis on sales and an ignorance of profit. That was the story over at Tyrrells, where an initially premium product had gradually seen prices decline over the years. Revenues remained flat, but by the time KP Snacks acquired the brand its profit had completely disappeared.”

In the Tyrrells brand turnaround, KP Snacks knew they had to get off “the short term drug of promotions” and invest in the brand instead. In pulling back on promotions, they ultimately increased the average price by 29%, which caused overall volume sales to drop by 27%.

Tyrrells global marketing controller Dan Winslet called this “a real squeaky bum moment” for the business, but they stuck with their turnaround plan. Four years later, revenue is up 40% at a much higher profit, and market share is up.

Price promotions will always be part of the brand marketing toolkit, but we always have to watch out for the slippery slope.

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“Digital Transformation” - new cartoon and post on why so many digital transformation projects fail https://lnkd.in/eK9w-RQ

Forrester found that 56% of companies have official digital transformation projects underway. They also found that “many don’t realize that transformation will be a permanent state of being” and that 21% of businesses think they are “finished” with digital transformation.

There’s a lot of talk about the promise and hype of digital transformation. But digital transformation means different things to different companies. And many digital transformation projects are siloed and short-term.

MIT researchers Thomas Davenport and George Westerman wrote a fascinating article on why so many high-profile digital transformations have failed at companies like GE, Nike, Lego, and Ford. I particularly liked this takeaway:

“Digital is not just a thing that you can buy and plug into the organization.

“It is multi-faceted and diffuse, and doesn’t just involve technology. Digital transformation is an ongoing process of changing the way you do business. It requires foundational investments in skills, projects, infrastructure ... it requires mixing people, machines, and business processes, with all of the messiness that entails.”

“Urgency without Clarity on Digital Transformation” - new cartoon and post https://lnkd.in/gBqmgtx

Organizations are all feeling the sudden and increased urgency of digital transformation. But there’s still a lack of clarity on what digital transformation actually means. Definitions vary widely between companies and within companies. When a term can be stretched to mean just about anything, it starts to mean nothing. Urgency without clarity can be a risky combination.

P&G digital transformation alum and author of “Why Digital Transformations Fail”, Tony Saldanha, put it this way:

“The biggest challenge in today’s world is the language related to digital transformation. The term has been co-opted by every IT marketing person selling anything from an email upgrade to artificial intelligence…

“Around the world, organizations are spending about a trillion dollars a year on digital transformation. Seventy percent of those transformations fail. I believe that this is happening because language prevents business and public sector owners from setting the right end goal. It also prevents them from following a very disciplined approach to getting there.”

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“Meeting Overload, Hybrid Work, and Asynchronous Communication” - new cartoon and post https://lnkd.in/gk7Z6BSV

Meetings have always been a favorite punching bag of modern work life. One survey in 2014 found that employees rated meetings as the “number one office productivity killer.”

But the shift to remote and hybrid work has strained our collective meeting culture even further. Microsoft’s most recent Work Trend Report found that weekly meeting time increased 2.5X from pre-pandemic levels, with average meeting times 10 minutes longer.

Hubspot just released their 2022 Hybrid Work Report and found that 70% of a hybrid workforce said that too many calls and meetings are disruptive to their concentration. And 58% of employees reported that at least half of the meetings they joined could have been emails instead.

With hybrid work, there’s a greater need than ever for communication, but “more communication” as the answer is taking a toll.

Much of the focus on addressing meeting fatigue so far has been on introducing new tools and technology. But as with many changes related to the amorphous term of “digital transformation”, technology is only part of the equation. The trickier stumbling block is cultural.

Matt Mullenweg runs Automattic (maker of WordPress), a company with 1,792 employees in 75 countries and no office. They’ve been on the leading edge of distributed work. Matt gave an interview with Sam Harris in 2020 on the five levels of autonomous work, which I think is an interesting way to think about the future of work, a shift from synchronous to asynchronous communications, and the role of meetings:

Level Zero: “a job which cannot be done unless you’re physically there”
Level One: “no deliberate effort to make things remote-friendly”
Level Two: “everything is still synchronous, your day is full of interruptions”
Level Three: “being remote-first, or distributed”
Level Four: “where things go truly asynchronous”
Level Five: “consistently perform better than any in-person organization could”

In early 2020, many organizations were forced to shift from Level One to Level Two. Some have shifted to Level Three. But it’s harder to make the shift to Level Four, let alone Level Five.

In one large-scale experiment, Salesforce recently tried canceling all meetings for 23,000 employees for one week. They called it “async week,” an attempt to work in a more asynchronous way. At the end of the week, 81% of employees reported they wanted more async weeks, at least quarterly.

But only 18% said they strongly agreed that the meeting-free work would “change their behavior toward meetings” and only one in eight identified a meeting they could “permanently cancel or stop attending.”

Looks like meetings as a cartoon topic will continue!

“Intent Signals” - new cartoon and post https://lnkd.in/gjd6GqAe

One of the mythical holy grails of marketing is to be able to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time. Easier said than done.

Despite all the focus on customer journeys, we’re still operating in the dark on what customers are actually looking for, much of the time.

Even the latest marketing tech stack tools and constantly more robust customer data can give us false confidence that we know what people want when they want it.

Some of the disconnect relates to marketing myopia and what I think of as “marketing funnel vision” — treating buyers as if they’re always on a linear transactional path to purchase. The reality is that potential customers are complex humans who don’t think about brands nearly as much as marketers think they do.

Marketers try to read the tea leaves by collecting and analyzing a dizzying variety of “intent signals” — ranging from overt cues (like filling out a lead generation form to download a white paper) to subtle guesswork, like how long someone lingers on a product page.

Marketing myopia can skew intent signals like a funhouse mirror. Not all intent signals are created equally. Many decay quickly (giving an email address one day doesn’t mean you’re in the market a week from now). And they can be easily misinterpreted when analyzed in a vacuum. Much of the traditional marketing funnel is a dark funnel and we can’t track most of the customer journey. There’s a lot marketers won’t be able to see.

AI promises to turbocharge all of this. But we have to be careful the false confidence that already exists doesn’t get turbocharged as well. With the same marketing myopia, an AI-powered customer journey may only result in annoying customers more efficiently.

I think we have to approach marketing with humility. Bad personalization is worse than no personalization.

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