Take a look at the data below and spot the alarming trend. These “intent to stay” trends are from CEB’s longitudinal study of employee engagement. We’ve been running this study for over a decade, surveying tens of thousands of workers. “Intent to stay” is an indicator of how happy and engaged employees are.
Since Q1 2011, overall intent to stay has been ticking up, and then holding steady. When we split the data by function, you can see this pattern holds true for every function except Marketing.
Wait, what? Marketing is the fast, go-go land of social and mobile excitement, right? Those jokers in finance and accounting are happier than we are in Marketing? Come on.
It’s hard to argue with the data here. Marketing is the only function that’s actually worse off than where it was in 2011.
What’s going on?
Report from the Engine Room: “The paid media lever is broken. ‘Always on’ is killing us. And by the way, we’re leaving.”
The short answer is, marketers are exhausted. CEB recently completed a six-month study of how marketing teams are organizing their ways of working for a technology-laden, networked consumer. Across dozens of conversations with marketers and their managers, anecdotes like this one were the common refrain:
“We just came off a campaign with a big social component. Good news: we demonstrated that social can drive incremental foot traffic. Bad news: we’re completely exhausted. This is not sustainable.”
--Marketing Leader, Fortune 1000 Retailer
The “Always On” marketing environment—24/7 conversation management, 1:1 marketing, in-the-moment content creation—is wearing down our people. It’s not scalable. At least not the way most marketing teams are attacking it today.
So what do we do?
The Insufficiency of Digital “Bolt-Ons”
To figure that out, we’ve got to step back and see the forest for the trees. Based on the research we’ve done, here is what we think is going on. In short: our marketing systems weren’t built for a networked world, and they’ve reached their limits. But, what does that mean exactly?
By “marketing system,” I mean the resource model, agency and other partners, structure, processes, and working culture…all rolled into one, as a system. That system, the underlying chassis, was built for a world where our Marketing was all about “deliver to”—delivering communications, messaging, experiences and new products to mass audiences. The whole system was oriented to consistency of outputs, control of inputs and process and predictability of impact. To make it hum, we standardized inputs and specialization of roles. All aimed at creating high production value, pre-planned, big-bang campaigns to help sell our goods and services to mass audiences.
That described a pretty well-functioning marketing system until about 2005. During the web 1.0 era (1995-2005), new touchpoints came on the scene (display, search, websites, etc.) and we were able to get along by adding in a digital agency and some digital marketers who sat in a center of excellence to run the digital components of our campaigns.
In other words, we “bolted on” digital components to our delivery-based marketing system. And this worked reasonably well. For a while.
Then social and mobile came along – and consumer attitudes and behaviors really changed, as they adopted social and mobile into their lives at light speed. Now, the majority of us wake up within arm’s reach of our mobile phone. I’ll spare you all the other markers of just how central social and mobile are to consumers. We all get it, because we’re consumers ourselves. It’s just the air we breathe, right?
As marketing leaders try to apply the same “bolt on” approach with social and mobile, and in particular as our digital spend rises above 20%, this is where the breakdowns occur. This is when our marketers start to get exhausted. What we’re all feeling is our classic, delivery-based marketing system hitting its limits. We’re not able to get BOTH the relevance that mobile/social-native consumers demand these days AND the scale that we need as marketers for large brands.
But why not? We hired all these smart digital marketers! They’re digital natives themselves! They’re Millennials! That’s WHY we hired them. Not to mention, we brought on this great social media agency. And, you should see the investments we’ve made in content asset management systems. Oh, did I mention we use Radian 6? And, we have this great digital lab where we hack cool mobile apps. The list goes on and on.
Why isn’t this working? Why are our marketers exhausted when we’re making all of these logical moves to engage consumers through digital, social and mobile?
You Don’t Have a Digital Marketing Problem. You Have a Marketing Problem.
As we conducted our research, we came across a number of brands that had been down this path, and realized it wasn’t working to break that relevance/scale tradeoff (recall: getting the relevance today’s consumers demand, at the scale marketing needs). They learned the hard way that they were solving the wrong problem. They were trying to solve a digital marketing problem, when they should have been solving a marketing problem.
They looked up and realized they had bolted-on all of these digital people, agencies, supporting technologies, but in doing so, they had really created two parallel marketing systems. They had their classic system, built to deliver scale through pre-planned, paid media. On the other hand, they had this smaller, higher-RPM digital system, stocked with digital natives, but with an inability to really get the broad reach that could move the needle for the business. Sure, they got flashes of digital success, even brilliance! But those were often with small audiences and they didn’t endure. So, inevitably, they didn’t scale.
Along the way, these digital natives were getting frustrated because the old system hampered their efforts and they began to leave for greener (read: more nimble) pastures. So now we have this retention problem with digital marketers.
Beyond that, when marketing tried to scale those social/mobile efforts by drawing in the marketers for arms and legs support – to scale the “always on” conversations and drive the 1:1 marketing – that’s when the broader exhaustion and frustration settled in. And that’s why intent to leave has gotten worse across Marketing broadly.
Having been through this pain, some leading brands realized their broader marketing system needed a wholesale change and they are aggressively moving to figure out how to change it. They need to leave behind the system that derives scale via pre-planned, big bang, point-in-time communications thru paid media, and instead achieve scale and relevance through agile management of ongoing earned, owned and shared media.
These are deep, dark woods to travel through. But we don’t have a choice as marketers in established brands. If we don’t re-orient the system, we’ll continue a slow but inevitable slide into irrelevance with consumers.
In my next blog post, I’ll unpack what the emerging marketing system actually looks like—and how some leading brands, like
Update/Correction: after the initial publication of this post, we noticed a calculation error in the Intent to Stay data. The corrected graphic is included above. The overall story is the same—Marketing is indeed the lowest compared to all other functions, with one exception: Finance & Accounting. So, there’s a dead heat at the bottom of the stack between Marketing and Finance. Our apologies to readers for any confusion.
