Creating ART

You can’t fail to notice, if you’ve read any of my stuff, that my marketing mantra is to create ART, Awareness, Revenue, and Trust. This page gives a bit of background on how I came to it.

The challenge

Marketing is often misunderstood, considered difficult to measure, or perceived as a field where marketers live by a set of metrics that the C-suite doesn’t understand or value. You often hear marketing investment being referred to as a “cost of doing business”, almost a tax, and marketers stuck on a hamster wheel of tactical tasks, unable to make a meaningful impact.

Unlike a tax, marketing spend is voluntary, and when companies don’t value marketing, as we all know, headcount and budget are quickly cut, and it’s tough to make the case to get those resources back. And the failure of marketing all becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as investment is cut and performance drops.

However, when marketing outcomes are understood and are hard-wired into the company’s goals and the leader’s objectives, along with all the additional gifts that marketing can bring to a business, like research and customer insight, performance improves, and marketing is recognized as a strategic function at the leadership table and an investment that has a return.

Developing the model

It was this environment that inspired me to develop a model and a set of objectives in my first CMO role, which I could easily explain to commercial leaders, the CEO, and investors, effectively positioning the strategic value of marketing investment.

This model became ART: Awareness, Revenue, and Trust. Which sounds cute, but has substance, as it is tied to a set of metrics that directly contribute to the business's goals, described in a language my senior colleagues and team can understand.

Of course, speak to the commercial leaders, and they suggest that the acronym should be RAT, with 'Revenue’ first, quite justifiably, as that is the #1 job of anyone in what I am describing as The Revenue Department (or sales and marketing).

I’ve found that just having this conversation builds a bridge to sales. But who wants RAT to be their marketing mantra?

The truth, of course, is that a buyer doesn’t buy unless they trust us and are aware of us, so Awareness and Trust come first. But, again, who wants to put “The Creator of TAR” on a T-shirt?

So, ART - Awareness, Revenue & Trust

The model isn’t a methodology; it’s a set of goals and objectives that broadly cover all the things that contribute to business success.

Awareness broadly encompasses brand, share of voice, sentiment, and all of that.
Revenue is, of course, driven by demand and lead generation activities, as well as the cost of acquisition and the share of wallet of existing clients.
Trust is the measurement of our content and product marketing, thought leadership, and customer trust and retention metrics.

Does it create ART?

Perhaps ART is not for you; if not, I encourage any marketer to adopt a similar structure of goals and objectives, such as OKRs or another model. However, what I really like about a model like this is that it enables you to quickly qualify all the requests that come into the marketing team, using a language that everyone understands.

We all know that everyone has an opinion and suggestions for what we should be doing and you can ask; will this create ART?

So, that’s my little introduction to ART, if you’d like to chat more, then please get in touch.