Ciceron Blog Archives

Marketing According to Blue Oyster Cult

On a near daily basis I get the opportunity to enter companies and talk about "redefining their happiness" as it relates to their marketing strategies. In most cases, the marketers who are happy are those who don't fear their data (or their IT departments) and understand that modern marketing is truly art and science combined. The marketers who are unhappy are those who hate data because it's so "techie" which means "I have to go down there and talk to the tech guys".

In most businesses, there are veritable football fields between IT departments and marketing departments. Why? Because most marketing and IT departments lack a common set of shared goals with a shared language and a shared business process. It's no wonder companies have inserted their own private Switzerland between them.

It can be better. When I say that people who have embraced both the art and science of modern marketing are happy, I mean it. Literally, blissful. They're at the center of the perfect storm. The CEOs are screaming for accountability, and they're getting it. The CIOs are demanding unity between IT initiatives and business outcomes, and they're accomplishing that. Sales departments are tired of "weak leads" through tired old marketing tactics, and they're getting more qualified and engaged prospects through campaigns that understand customer behaviors, buying patterns, and needs.

As was shared in last month's newsletter, the perfect storm is being created by marketing performance measurement (MPM) models. MPM initiatives, even on the smallest of scale, provide IT and marketing folks a framework for working together towards shared goals. The goals are typically centered around either revenue or market intelligence. As a result so there's no squishy subjectivity in the process. Either you made money or you didn't. Either you learned something or you didn't. That's a far cry from the old days, where marketing was reliant solely upon quite subjective measurements.

MPM models redraw corporate boundaries by brilliantly encapsulating IT and marketing together in ways where each other can still sit within their respective comfort zones. A brave MPM initiative allows marketers to be creative through highly targeted content and breakthrough design while giving IT a whole new world of web analytics, data warehousing, and automated reporting. Together they work towards accountability and performance. One can't do it without the other.

If you think this all sounds like some sort of new fangled enlightened fooey hoo-hah, like 40,000 marketers and IT people united in a grand quest to redefine corporate happiness, you may be onto something. Just take out the fooey hoo-hah. It's happening right now.

Get started!

Oh. And more cowbell.
(From one of the greatest Saturday Night Live skits of all time.)