Marketing Innovation versus Marketing Obsolescence

As marketing becomes increasingly technological, like technology it has a lifecycle and also becomes obsolete. It doesn’t become obsolete overnight; it just slowly becomes less and less effective.  Efforts can be made to tweak its effectiveness, but it can’t avoid the inevitable. As products and industries have a life cycle, so do the practices and processes of functions such as marketing. If one isn’t careful, one might think nothing has changed but rather we are just calling the old things with new names. For example, we have always published collateral material and we started referring to collateral material as digital assets, and digital assets became content. Now white papers, brochures, sell sheets, case studies and use cases are all content. But in the past we wrote them to help us sell, not to help people buy. Our “sell sheets” had little value added content for the reader. There is a world of difference between thinking of collateral as a media similar to broadcasts, print, outdoor, etc. and content marketing.  Collateral marketing thinking in a content marketing world is obsolete thinking.

Brian Kardon just wrote a post, “5 Tips for the Modern CMO” about how he realized one day, after reading the book Inbound Marketing by Hub Spot founders Brian Halligan
and Dharmesh Shah that everything he had learned at Wharton and from his significant CMO experiences was obsolete, and how he needed to turn that around. Obsolete may seem extreme, but if you go from spending years trying to be a proficient outbound marketer and 98% of your efforts are outbound and you want to switch that to 98% inbound, then much of what you learned would be obsolete or not relevant. If you read Brian’s post, then you should also read the post written by David Merriman Scott on the same topic. What I found interesting was the number of CMOs who could personally identify with Brian’s journey to move from analog to digital.  My show CMO Advantaged focused on this same challenge.

But if we take what these CMOs are saying to the next level, then the question is not just how do we keep ourselves from becoming dinosaurs, but how do we keep our marketing department from becoming a dinosaur and becoming a competitive disadvantage?

Unfortunately, many companies do adopt new technologies, but their mindset doesn’t change. They have a “Push” or outbound mindset in an inbound world. The result is they have an outbound platform that they keep tacking new technologies to. They need a mobile strategy, so they create a mobile web site and mobile aps, they know they need to listen to their customers, so they buy some listening software, they know they need to reach influencers, so they buy some influencer software.  Each of these ad hoc add-ons is good in and of themselves, but what is lacking is an overarching strategy and the action of adopting these new technologies won’t prevent the marketing department from becoming obsolete.  The marketing department in this case is not innovating, evolving or adopting, at best its reacting.

I remember a few years ago when TV transitioned from analog to digital broadcasting. There were some who didn’t make the transition and bought a digital to analog converter. That let people continue experiencing TV the way they were used to, but they had far fewer benefits than their friends and neighbors who made the switch. I think this situation is similar; the digital to analog converter was a new piece of technology that extended the life of an obsolete technology. I feel many marketing departments are extending the life of an old mindset or platform with their new technology.

Not only do we as practitioners need to make the transition, and we need a strategy to help our departments transition but we need an innovation strategy to help us with on-going renewal so we don’t find ourselves with obsolete thinking and tools in the future. That is one of the biggest mistakes companies make, they see the light, want to adopt a web strategy and don’t realize the world has evolved to a 2.0 platform. They rush to implement social media best practices, and discover they are behind because the world has moved on again. Because they lack a marketing innovation strategy, they have no way of keeping ahead of the curve and thus they are continually falling behind. Instead of fighting to innovate, they are fighting obsolesce.