Tuesday 2¢ - Another Shit Idea

This week, I wonder why, in B2B marketing, we have to reinvent everything constantly and ignore the classics.

I saw a comment from the infamous brand consultant and marketing professor Mark Ritson this week on a thread about marketing funnels, and aside from feeling a little sorry for the marketer who poked the Ritson bear with their earnest and slightly daft view that a funnel should be hourglass-shaped (read the full thread here) - the good Mr. Ritson makes a splendid and succinct point:

I re-posted this, as a jolly chortle, but thinking about this some more (not much more obviously as this is a weekly half-baked thought) - you could apply this to lots of the things of marketing and replace the word “funnel” with many B2B marketing sacred cows.

Your thing is shit, here is my shit thing.

Sacred cows?

I don’t mean that do I?

As we slaughter everything in B2B marketing or at least we ignore it, nothing is scared.

Plus, you may think that saying “shit” is bad what we often see is:

Your thing is dead here is my shit thing.

And I wonder why.

I was discussing something similar with my chum Robert Rose on the Rockstar CMO podcast, as we took a tangent as he dived into marketing careers (something he wrote about on his Rose-Colored glasses column for CMI) we chatted about the silos we build, the specialisms and this led us down the path of two old geezers shouting at clouds about why nobody respects the marketing classics.

And, it’s not just us, coincidently, it came up as a topic of discussion on one of my favorite marketing podcasts between Drew Neisser and former CMO and co-founder of Marketo Jon Miller - that the classics “product-market fit, positioning, and reputation” are more important than ever for marketing success.

Do CFO’s post that they have a better method of measuring profitability than EBITDA? (Which is, of course, Earnings before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization).

I don’t hang out in those circles, but I don’t think so.

You could argue that our discipline is ever evolving; I suspect that potty-mouthed Ritson doesn’t believe that it’s just the hourglass-shaped funnel is shit; the simplistic notion of the funnel raises questions (or is shit). If I’ve paid any attention to his work it’s that we need to play the long and the short game and the funnel focuses too much on the short.

This comes from The Long and Short of It by Les Binet and Peter Field, which is just over a decade old. In the great scheme of what one might deem as a classic, it is a babe compared to, say (plucking a random old book from my bookshelf) The One to One Future by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers of 1993, which expressed many of the ideas that marketers are inventing, discovering, and getting “super excited” about on LinkedIn today.

Now I’ve flicked open my copy of The One to One Future, this is genius - random page 342 - they talk about video, yes, there are dated references, but the crux is they talk about creating video being cheaper than classified ads, being personalized on demand and “anyone creating a home shopping network” - if you have any interest in our history, get your hands on a used copy and flick it open, as this has slowed down writing this 2¢… well… god damn, this was 1993.

I’ve digressed, and no, I was not a marketer in 1993; this book just found itself on what I could loosely call the curriculum of my self-taught marketing course over the years.

And I am getting no closer to explaining why we feel the need to tell the world "this is shit, and here is my shit thing".

Is it because nobody thinks you are sexy if you say that you are (for example) a practitioner of the four P’s of marketing (popularized by Phillip Kotler in the 60’s)?

Nobody will like and share that LinkedIn post, you can’t write a book about that (it’s been written), or create a new methodology (it exists), be the leading practitioner (umm… did I mention Kotler?), create a unique marketing course or do the speaker circuit.

It's way better (or easier) to promote your uniquely weird-shaped funnel or claim that Agile marketing is a thing. Oh, don’t get me started…

Aside from the individual bloggers and LinkedIn gurus, we have a respectable industry of researchers and analysts who shape our thoughts and are desperately creating the hills they can claim and put their flag in, give it a TLA or a fancy title.

To misquote a bit of Monty Python “Demand Generation, fuck off, this is Frontline Marketing”

Is it the unique culture of B2B marketing?

We are not only magpies looking for the next shiny thing, we would love to be lauded for making the shiny thing for the other magpies.

(Or maybe, if I was to channel Mr Ritson, next shit thing).

Is it that we are so insecure about our practice, a self confidence eroded by decades of being called “the coloring in department” that we constantly think it needs fixing that the old thing is broken?

And the call is not just coming from in the house - Product Led Growth (PLG) - led by the product teams who believe product features trump awareness, is sucking a lot of the B2B marketing oxygen out of the room, according to this post by Tyrona (Ty) Heath of The B2B Institute at LinkedIn that floated through me feed recently.

The research she shares opens with “Despite marketing's critical role in B2B technology companies, marketing leaders (particularly brand) don’t always get to exert the same influence as their peers in product”.

The buzzword TLA beats the classics.

I seem to have opened a Pandoras box on myself with this quick thought. There are no quick answers here, but maybe it’s about who we follow and there are people passionate about the fundamentals, the classics and what has gone before and I’ve mentioned 5 of them here; Ritson, Rose, Neisser, Miller and Heath.