Scott Davis - author of three books - including his recent marketing book “The Shift - the transformation of today’s marketers into tomorrow’s growth leaders”, talks about marketing experiences in this 9 minute long video. Please find the transcript below.

Scott Davis is a Senior Partner with Prophet. He has 20 years of brand, marketing strategy, and new product development experience that he has brought to bear for many Prophet clients, including GE, ExxonMobil, The Carlson Companies, Johnson and Johnson, The Wrigley Company, Boeing, Payless ShoeSource, and Allstate.

Scott is the author of Brand Asset Management: Driving Profitable Growth Through Your Brands (2000), named one of the top 30 books of 2000 by Executive Book Summaries. Scott’s second book, Building the Brand-Driven Business: Operationalize Your Brand to Drive Profitable Growth (2002) was published to highly regarded reviews. His third book, The Shift: The Transformation of Today’s Marketers into Tomorrow’s Growth Drivers was released in May 2009. (watch out on this blog for a review of that book).

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

I can’t boil down a 225-page book into 10 minutes. But I could tell you a little bit about the premise and what I was thinking about when I wrote the book. And it’s this - I’ve been in marketing for a long. I’ve written - this is my third book. And it’s this challenge that I continue to see in the marketplace around marketing. And it’s a challenge that’s been highlighted by a study that’s leveraged in the States through an organization called Spencer Stewart which actually looks at the lifespan of senior marketers whether its chief marketing officers, senior VP’s of marketing, directors of marketing and they continue to have a lifespan in an organization between 2 and 2½ years.

So they enter an organization for about 2 years, there’s some questions around the 2 year mark and then they leave after 2½ years. And I look at CEO’s, I look at CFO’s, I look at COO’s and every one of them had a lifespan of at least 5 to 7 years within an organization.

And so this has been haunting me for many years as to why this is the case. And I think it’s because. and we started talking about this a little bit this morning, marketing does a terrible job of marketing itself.

And what we end up doing is we create a doom loop. And it’s a very circular mentality.

Marketing is thought of as managing the agency relationships, taking care of marketing communications, taking care of sales programs, printing the brochure and being the logo caps. And it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy because we’re not actually adding a lot of demand generation and value to the bottom line.  And I call these tactician marketers in the book. And we all know them they’re out and they’re part of our world. On the other hand, I’m dealing with a lot of clients, of colleagues and friends that had made a leap. And they are now what I called visionary marketers. And they have a different profile and they’ve rebranded themselves in their organizations and they rebranded marketing in their organizations to be much more about driving growth and driving demand.

So here’s the attributes of these folks.

So they are PNL oriented so they think about the P&L in everything they do and every decision they make. They have relationships with the executive suite that go beyond just a “hi and a bye” in the hallway but they actually are deep collaborative relationships. They have relationships at the board level so they are actually reporting into the board and working with the board on a daily basis. They are thinking about the growth agenda every single day. And they have figured out a way to actually link marketing into the 3 to 5 year growth plans of the organization. They are thinking about hitting the quarterly numbers but also planting longer term seeds for growth. And they’ve really taken hold of the innovation agenda. And I think most interestingly, these folks have built teams around them with capabilities and competencies that have made them better. And they continue to look for individuals that are actually better than them to help bolster their own game.

And so as Charlie introduced this idea of the economic situation that we’re in today and companies searching for organic growth and leveraging the assets that they currently have. It’s a moment of time for marketers to step up and take on a different profile and it’s one that again I would say is headed directly to the growth agenda. And so what I suggest in the book is thinking about these tactician marketers, thinking about these visionary marketers, what of the shifts that they’ve made? And there are 5 course shifts that I talked about in the book and I won’t try to get to all of them in any kind of depth.

But the first shift is all about stop thinking about marketing strategies and start thinking about the growth agenda and the growth and business impact. I think too often as marketers, we build a marketing plan that’s base on what we did last year, an incremental growth or incremental budget over last year as opposed to what are the 5 revenue line or demand initiatives that we are focus on to drive our numbers for the year. And how do I link myself to those? So this first shift is getting out of marketing as the activity and getting into growth and impact as really the driver and how do we better link those two together.  And there’s a lot of - in the book I talked a lot about the ways that marketers could earn credibility in actually doing that.

The second shift is one that’s a little harder for marketers to get their heads around. And it’s this idea of we no longer control the brand.  We need to seize control of the brand. Others outside our four walls actually on the brand and I would argue that’s been the case for a long time. When I worked at P & G it was always the case that Moms own the brand. And to this day the network continues to cascade out in terms of those folks that are influencing the brand and actually driving purchase intent and consideration of preference. And it’s very rarely that we are able to push our message forward and actually get a consumer to react directly to our message. It’s this world around us that are driving purchase intent.

So how do we influence the network? Third, I do not believe there’s anybody better set in the organization to drive innovation than marketing. And I still do not understand why marketers are not given more of an innovation lead. And so I talked a lot about in the book this idea of stop thinking about incremental improvements, stop thinking about stage gate processes, stop thinking about line extensions and flankers and start thinking about new business models, new customer experiences, new pricing strategies, new channel strategies and different ways to leverage your customer insights to actually drive the innovation agenda forward.

Fourth shift, one of my colleagues was here a few months ago and he talked a lot about marketing accountability and how do you start to measure return on investment. And I think we’ve gotten to the point in marketing where it is a science and we can actually figure out what our sponsorship returns to us. But I’m seeing a different type of agenda for a lot of marketers. -A different type of agenda where marketers are looking at “Am I making an investment in the sponsorship?” Or “Am I going to make an investment in increasing my sales office in the western region?” And these marketers are selfless in thinking about growth and they only think about growth when they stop thinking about marketing communications tactics.

And the fifth shift I talked about in the book is this one that surround how do you organize around the customer? And stop organizing around how you are set up inside. And I find too many companies that think about the organization and the org construct in the hierarchy is how they represent themselves to the market as opposed to putting the customer at the center of the world. And one of my best examples is we’re talking before about NBC as one of our clients is how do you put the customer and the viewer in the middle of your world as opposed to the network? And do you actually start to think about all the different ways to influence that viewer. And there are multiple ways and I think for too often in the media world, it’s the network that’s in the middle, it’s the one-half hour sitcom away from finding our way again. And the reality is the viewer is looking at your network and everything around your network is the way they want to interact with you. And so how do we start the shift at that network? And I’ve talked to marketers at ge.comstock@cmo@bestbuy Barry Judge, the CMO there at Wal-Mart Steven Queen, the CMO there and they’ve all figured out different ways to break through. And I think what they’ve all done is they’ve spent time in the field ringing the cash registers, talking to customers, they spend time within P&O’s of running P&O’s, they’ve taken small victories that they’ve had in the marketplace and they figured it out how to package them and they figured it out how to intimately put themselves in connection with the growth agenda and really trying to drive a longer term strategy.

And these 5 shifts of the book, they’re not easy, they’re bit aspirational for many companies but I think those companies that want to try to separate themselves from tactician marketers only to what I would call visionary marketers have to start to make these shifts. And I’ll talk more about this at the Q & A. Thank you.

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