Marketing Innovation and the Training Challenge

A new challenge CMOs face is the practice of marketing is changing faster than our educational system’s ability to train students on the changes. Advances in marketing science, marketing engineering and marketing technology are occurring in shorter and shorter intervals and they are happening concurrently. The problem will only get worse as marketing technology companies are able to incorporate the latest advances into their products faster than the educational system can teach those advances to students. And with ‘Big Data” from web sites, e-mails, SEO, devices, sensors, etc., operations researchers will be able to develop more advanced marketing models, similar to what they did with scanner data. This will allow marketers and social scientists to study buyer behavior faster, more accurately and in more ways. This will lead to even more advancement. Today’s marketing candidates need to be more technological and statistical in their preparation and having a Facebook or Twitter account is not enough. In fact the teaching of marketing has not changed much in years, which is the source of the problem.

Advances in marketing primarily occurred in the academic realm as professors published their research in academic journals. That research was later reviewed and incorporated into the latest text-book, which was often published a year or more after it was written. The latest findings in a text-book were often several years old. Consumer packaged goods companies did their own R&D and it was similar to what the academics did, although it might have been more practical.  Some of their learning made its way into text-books as case studies years later as well. And trade journals published articles on advances in the industry, but their frequency was limited and it still took several months before an article went from acceptance to publication. There are probably more insights, discoveries and research published daily on blogs than there were published articles in months in the past. In the past, that was alright as the practice of marketing changed slowly.

In the past you could major in communications, journalism, graphic design, liberal arts, particularly economics or marketing in preparation for a career in marketing. You could learn what you needed to know on the job.  Now you could graduate from a top college with honors in a marketing major, or from a top business school and still not know how to do Inbound marketing, even if you took a social media class or two along the way. Now the practice of marketing is much more technology driven and requires more analytics.

One of the largest barriers marketing vendors face with the adoption of their technology is prospective customers taught the old way of marketing believe these new product are too hard to learn. A big reason for lost customers or churn is, customers not getting the full value from the product, or businesses feeling they need to hire an outside consultant to use the tool for them, which makes the price too high when combined with the purchase or subscription price.

The underlying issue is conceptually, marketing is being reengineered and the educational system doesn’t support it, nor does the corporate training market or most vendors.

The problem is every day, hundreds of thousands of marketers are taught to do marketing the old way. The technology is advancing much faster than the change in the training of marketing professionals. When the reengineering “revolution” took place, not only did the software manufacturers such as SAP, Oracle and PeopleSoft provide training, so did all of the major consulting firms such as Deloitte, Accenture, IBM, and corporate trainers also stepped in to train practitioners. In the past when you did a large software implementation, the budget included a large training budget. Buying software on a subscription basis seems to have changed that.

The ever growing number of social media related conferences helps but does not close the education gap. Corporate training departments don’t seem to have stepped in to provide the necessary training either.  Sure, you could get bits and pieces from organizations such as MarketingProfs, MarketingShepra, eMarketer, TechCrunch, Mashable, Smart Brief or from some of the Ad Age Power 150 blogs. That helps you see the trees but not the forest.

CMOs have to address this challenge for their staff. The answer lies in taking advantage of the advances in e-learning.  From Khan Academy to MIT and Harvard’s edX effort to put their courses on-line, e-learning has made significant advances over the years and I believe having people trained to do Inbound Marketing via on-line courses, could really help transform marketing and lower customer service costs.  But it is more than just learning Inbound Marketing, its learning mobile, augmented reality, the “Internet of things,”etc. and the next big thing(s).

CMOs need to address the training challenge that goes along with trying to have an innovative marketing practice. How do we provide the training and support for continuous education and professional development such that our staff our up to date on the latest advances in marketing science, technology and engineering? What incentives do we provide, do we budget money for conferences and courses? Is there a continuous education requirement for performance evaluation? There are a lot of bad ones out there, do we provide a list of approved vendors for marketing education like we do for other services?