The marketing guru

Marketing budgets across Europe may be shrinking but there’s no better time to get your company’s message across, according to Donovan Neale-May, Executive Director of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council. He tells BM the latest marketing tricks his members have up their sleeves.

BM. What is the feeling among your members regarding the effects of the downturn on the European marketing industry?
Donovan Neale-May. We've just completed our latest Marketing Outlook Study and generally we're not seeing direct predictions of imminent failure. In fact we're seeing a fairly positive outlook. I think what you see and read in the newspapers is not necessarily reflected within marketing organisations themselves. However there is clearly a lot of tightening up of marketing within companies and there are a huge number of marketing people that are on the street so there are clearly retrenchments on marketing folks out there.

Within marketing organisations I think they are looking strongly at the types of skills and proficiencies they need to actually embrace new digital marketing programmes and strategies. They are paying a lot more attention to the customer and to understanding who they are doing business with, who their most profitable customers are and what the lifetime value is of those customers. More traditional PR functions have been impacted more than the folks that working in areas like search engine marketing, demand generation, lead acquisition and search advertising.

BM. How many companies are cutting their marketing budgets?
DNM. Well actually we've seen around 30 percent of companies increasing their marketing spend. Also it's less about cutting budget than redirecting spend.

It's going to be more expensive and difficult to acquire new customers so companies are focussing on the customers they have and what to do with those customers relative to getting increased value from them or using them as agents to help introduce other customers to you.  This situation is forcing companies to do something which they've been very poor at which is to grab more customer data, get deep inside it and figure out ways to get more tightly connected with the customer.

BM. The CMO Council has published a report claiming that marketing departments are not forming strong enough relationships with other parts of the business such as IT and finance. What could they learn from these departments?
DNM. The marketing departments today have got to want to live, breath and eat data. The trouble is that so much data is being generated today and it is not being collected effectively, mined effectively or leveraged. There are so many different third party data sources that you can gather insights from. But companies don't even necessarily use that data. With a lot of marketing folk their modus operandi is focused on spent, not around analytics or insight gathering. They need to be able to not just acquire a contact but track and monitor the return from that contact. Marketing departments need to look at hiring people from different backgrounds such as people with PHDs that can run algorithms and figure out the likelihood of propensity expectation.

BM. How are marketing companies taking advantage of social networking technology?
DNM. It depends on the product they are marketing. If you are in a consumer business there are obviously some very creative ways to get your brand, or your experience or your product talked about using social networks. On a consumer level there are opportunities to virally communicate and to introduce conversations into communities that centre around new offerings, new innovations and new experiences.

At the same time you can build a collectivised customer community, particularly on the b2b side. It's about creating a shared interest group around themes, issues, needs and requirements, not necessarily about your product. You're creating an affinity network of decision makers who have an interest and want to interact peer-to-peer.

Trusted business networks are very powerful. They are the way people, in many cases, influence and shape huge amounts of spend.

BM. What do you think are next big marketing trends? Can you predict any groundbreaking new marketing methods that may be used in the future?
DNM. Well I think the future is all about automating on a massive scale and about interacting more with the marketplace and being far more agile and adaptive and responsive to shifts and trends.  One of the trends will be cyber-eavesdropping - listening in to the conversations people are having on the web. For instance we've built a whole global community of mobile computer users and we use a system called Track the Yak which has been developed by an Indian marketing analytics company. This features an intelligent agent, which you can programme to track certain topics that are being discussed in certain environments such as forums, bulletin boards, news groups and blogs. You can it to track conversations around issues. So for instance a company like Shell could track conversations about environmental concerns or lawsuits or things that their company might be embroiled in from a programme reputation point of view. The future is about getting much smarter and using the new interconnected world that we live in.

BM. What are the benefits to marketing officers of using cyber-eavesdropping techniques?
DNM. This technology allows marketers to track every nuance of discussion, to track discussions about fashion, electronics and all sorts of consumer goods. This allows them to predict trends more effectively and manage their demand and supply chains more adeptly. They could also identify potential threats that could be incursions into their market space. This technique should, if it is embraced properly and systemised, could put companies at a significant competitive advantage. This sort of technology will transform the way people acquire customers, keep customers and more importantly, operate their marketing programmes globally on a much more efficient level

BM. How will mobile technology change marketing techniques?
DNM. The future is very mobile. The new markets around the world are being driven entirely by mobile communications and cellular technology. Places like African and Latin America and Eastern Europe don't have structured markets, they have informal markets and the future for marketers there is to look at new channels for interaction. The mobile device is going to be the primary way to interact with the market and deliver contents and create relationships. When you look at text messaging applications it's not just about games and content. It's about delivering messages. So for instance a message could be sent out to farmers saying the climate is great and now is the time to spray their crops or to senior citizens telling them when to refill their medication.

Donovan Neale-May is Executive Director and founder of the CMO Council - a global network of 3,500 senior marketing and branding executives. He is president of GlobalFluency Inc. The company specialises in Intelligent Market Engagement and has 70 offices in 40 countries employing 450 employees.

Previously he held senior marketing positions in marketing, promotions and public relations agencies in Silicon Valley, New York, London and Los Angeles.

For five years he ran Ogilvy & Mather's West Coast PR operations and managed communications during the formative years of Dell Computer in the mid 1980s.

During his 30-year career Neale-May has consulted with over 300 leading multi-national companies, including Del Monte, Samsonite, Colgate, Lever, Polaroid and Kraft General Foods.

This article appeared first in Business Management, European edition, in June 2009: www.bme.eu.com/article/Issue-11/Lead-Features/The-marketing-guru.