I shared a keynote at mParticle’s 2019 Acceleration on the evolution of Marketing from a fluff engine to a Growth Engine. Many of you have asked for the content, here is a summary and the slides at the bottom. Take a read.

Why is marketing being a growth engine even a topic? Because in 9 out of 10 cases, it isn’t. It is a cost center, it is a team that spends a lot of money but has no idea what it does to the business. Marketers launch big tentpole campaigns a few times a year to create a splash not knowing if the splash moved any needle — often not even knowing which needle to move. They sit on an island not worrying about the business. In fact they don’t understand it or the consumer, what she wants, why she wants it. They say they are consumer obsessed but they are really “channel obsessed”. They organize by channel, operate by channel, partner by channel, incentivize by channel unlike the consumer who only operates around “value and experience”. Marketing is a fluff engine.

Well as a marketer though, am sure none of us believe that. We don’t want it to be that. Whatever we do and however we do it, the reason why we do it, is to impact lives, impact the business and impact the world…

Unfortunately it ain’t happening today at least not often enough. I see many reasons for it. But before I get started, I usually like to share my background and give you one last chance to stop right here, have a coffee, do something more fun because you are about to spend the next few mins listening to an engineer talk about why marketing does not work and how marketers need to UNLEARN marketing (in fact stop marketing).

Yes, I grew up as an engineer spending hours in front of a blue Turbo C++ compiler screen. As computer engineers we hated marketing and marketers. They were like sales people while we could build stuff. No surprises, my journey started as a pure engineer and technologist. Who knew I would sub-consciously make my way into the world of marketing. While I have never studied marketing, like everyone else I have been a victim of marketing (as a consumer) for many years.

Consumer Led Era

There is no doubt that this is a consumer led era. Disruption has already happened. Self-driving cars, people flying in fly-suits, press a button to order your next supply of Tide and get it in 4 hours, walk into your house and Alexa will tell you what you should do next. It’s crazy, insane and scary.

But has the world of marketing evolved with this evolution? Has it changed from the days of the Mad Men, when it was all about the Midas touch, everything you touched turned into gold. Marketing was all about the most creative and witty ad, the awards, the reach, the show. The belief that you as a brand are unique just like everyone else. More soft, more durable, more white.

The “Growth” Question Finally Pops Up

You know the industry is moving at the core when the traditional 100+ year old companies start to change (real or facade does not matter). That happened when Coke replaced the role of Chief Marketing Officer into a Chief Growth Officer. I don’t know if that changed the underlying mindset or culture or if it was just semantics. It was a sign nonetheless.

In many ways, the genesis for this growth mindset started with Facebook forming a growth team under Chamath Palihapitiya. You could argue that he was the architect who took Facebook from breaking the 100M MAU barrier (never done back then by any social networking platform) to a 500M MAU, setting the foundation for a 1B+ MAU over the next 10 years. Here is a great Q&A with Andy Johns, former product manager in that growth team at Facebook.

That success at Facebook and other product companies created a new layer of “growth teams” that sat outside the traditional Product and Marketing functions.

While that worked brilliantly for Facebook back then, it also meant Marketing and Product were not capable or accountable for growth. And they could continue to spend dollars and resources in launching features or launching campaigns, while the “growth team” would figure out a way to grow the business (drive user growth, build habits, virality, network effects and more).

Bifurcation of Marketing

As marketers we did little to prove that assumption wrong. Instead, we went ahead and bifurcated marketing into many pieces — mobile marketing, content marketing, search marketing and more recently it’s either Brand Marketing or Performance Marketing. Over the last few years, I have seen a number of founders and organizations oscillate back and forth between brand and performance. But is it really an either or?

Shouldn’t all brand effort drive performance and all performance marketing help build the brand. Shouldn’t you just “market to grow”, why else should marketing exist?

When I Say “GROWTH”, it is not limited to the quantitative growth of KPIs like CAC, LTV, CAC:LTV, MAU, DAU:MAU, Gross Margin and others. Of course we need to grow the user base. We need to grow the “user value” every single time since that is the only way for you to earn the right to bring the user back one more time.

It’s all of that “AND” growing the brand, growing that emotional underlying connection with your user base. It is strengthening that shared purpose and mission that you share with your audience. With a single minded focus on “performance” you can grow from the 0–1 stage but to get to 1-N stage (scaled growth), you need to build a resilient, purpose driven brand as the foundation.

The 3 are NOT isolated, they amplify each other and marketing has to prove that amplification, not just through a philosophical belief but through data.

CMOs need to prove the incrementality of a strong resilient brand on the efficiency and effectiveness of performance marketing

Growth is Not Owned But Orchestrated

I have nothing against dedicated growth teams, my biggest learnings have come from my experience being part of them. But I do have a problem with two types of beliefs:

First Belief, a stereotype that any single team or function can “own growth”. It is impossible. We can create that false perception but in reality scaled growth is “orchestrated and not owned” by any single function.

Scaled growth is orchestrated and not owned by any single function in an organization

You need orchestrators of growth who can ensure every team contributes to it. It is a function of many things going right from the core product to marketing to fulfillment to operations to engineering. Any broken part will impact the overarching experience, ultimately impacting growth.

In fact your internal culture is the single biggest driver or blocker of your company’s growth

Your culture needs to evolve from “my team” to “our team”, from “reporting to me” to “working with me”, from isolated teams to cross-functional outcome/KPI driven pods.

That culture within your organization can be orchestrated by HR but every single person in your organization has to own it and live it, every single day.

This is no different than building a brand — marketing is not the owner of the brand but an orchestrator of that journey. Otherwise the brand becomes a superficial layer that reflects your design system not your culture, your identity or your belief. Every function in the organization has to build that brand every single day.

Second Belief, that marketing can never be that orchestrator of growth. It has to be either the product team or the isolated growth team. Marketing should only focus on building the brand, running global tentpole campaigns. In fact in many leading product companies (cannot name for obvious reasons), marketing is only responsible for so-called “brand marketing” while consumer insights, analytics and even “performance marketing” sits with product or growth. I strongly believe that you organize around your leaders. In many of those cases perhaps that was the best path. However:

Any marketing organization that either directly or indirectly does not impact growth and/or is not held accountable for growth, should not exist.

No Smoke Without Fire — Most Marketers Focus on Outputs Not Outcomes

Having said all that, I do agree that most marketing functions focus on the vanity KPIs and impact and not tangible measurable growth. That requires a fundamental mindset shift in marketing, a shift from Outputs to Outcomes. I shared 10 principles to drive that transformation in this post.

You may or may not agree with much of the perspective but I am sure you would agree that Marketing has to become an “impact” function, not a fluff function.

Marketing — A Fluff Engine or a Growth Engine was originally published in Get Freshly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Mayur Gupta

I was recently asked to talk about my journey from an engineer to the Chief Marketing Officer at Freshly. My initial response was, “Oh, that’s easy!” But I quickly realized it isn’t, especially when you feel that you may not have anything particularly special to share. As I reflected on my career trajectory, though, I realized that maybe my mistakes and the lessons I learned are what make my experience stand out.

At the core of this transformation lies the belief that engineering is more than a profession or an academic degree — it is a mindset. As long as we build technology not just for the sake of it, but for a larger mission or purpose, we have the power to anticipate people’s needs, solve their problems, shape their experiences and improve their lives. And this is where marketing, with both a systems thinking approach and a focus on outcomes, can make all the difference.

But first, let me rewind.

‘Hammer’ Time

I grew up in New Delhi, India, where it’s common for a single college spot or job opening to draw thousands of applications. So, at a young age, we learn to choose between what makes our hearts happy and what’s going to help us earn a living.

That’s why my mother encouraged me to become a computer engineer — a field that was and continues to be in high demand in a country of 1.3 billion people — despite my passion for playing cricket.

After earning a master’s degree in computer science, I did my internship at HCL Technologies as a C++ developer and then joined SapientNitro as a Java/J2EE developer in India in 2001. I moved to the client side to build an online education platform in Scottsdale, AZ in 2002. Looking back, it’s clear to me that I acted as a hammer for a few years, and, in that phase, everything I saw looked like a nail. In other words, I wasn’t thinking of outcomes, solving problems or altering human habits. Instead, I was simply churning out code (and at times code with a lot of bugs and memory leaks).

My career took an unexpected turn in 2006, and I owe that to one of my mentors, David Murphy, senior vice president and managing director of SapientNitro in the UK. Our company had just acquired an AdTech Platform — BridgeTrack by Planning Group International — and David entrusted me with the responsibility of being a Product Lead. The role moved me from a world of pure technology to building platforms and products for the world of marketing and advertising.

After work hours, I would often pour over Wikipedia (with most simple explanations), reading everything I could on pixels, publishers, ad server, bid management and other topics I was alien to. Little did I know that my life was about to change in ways that I, with my restricted perspective and narrow view, could not even imagine.

Before I knew it, it was 2009 and as is common in any growth company, I had an evolved role. It now included co-leading a production studio as well as spearheading marketing technology strategies for a number of Fortune 100 clients. It was yet another step closer to using technology to solve consumer problems and business needs.

‘Always-On’

I ventured out of Sapient University, as I have fondly dubbed it, and joined Kimberly Clark as their first-ever Chief Marketing Technologist in 2012 and was soon profiled on Harvard Business Review. This experience taught me about the application of technology for a broader outcome and how to influence change in a 150-year-old organization that straddles 80-plus markets.

In fact, I now believe that technology is the interface of marketing. As I look around at the myriad successful companies and brands around us, it’s clear that they are using technology, innovation, data and science to solve basic yet unsolved human needs.

Marketing is no longer just about catchy creatives or hilarious advertisements. It’s about trying, failing, learning and experimenting. It’s about offering experiences that forge connections with consumers and inspire behavioral change. It needs to be an “always-on” experience for an “always-on” consumer, who is making life decisions at 12 a.m. without waiting for our next campaign.

It’s also time for the field of marketing to move beyond being complicated and complex. The only way we can sell technology is by translating it to its simplest form. If we can’t do that, we may not fully understand what we’re trying to sell.

So, when faced with a choice between building technological solutions and creating products that matter, I went with marketing — an unexpected choice, considering I knew next to nothing about the field.

I do know, however, that we have all, at one point or another, been victims of marketing, with marketers using diverse channels to sell stuff and talk at us without understanding what we really want and need, and interrupting our lives as opposed to offering experiences that enhance and change them.

Marketing can be inauthentic, false, and broken.

The biggest challenge and opportunity for marketing is to stop marketing. We have to unlearn marketing. It’s time to initiate conversations and engage with people, listen, understand and imagine if not predict human needs and do the best you can to meet them. The traditional model of a campaign with a start and end date does not work any more for a consumer who is buying at her own choice of time, location and channel. Marketing has to become always-on, always listening, engaging, analyzing and then trying again.

The need for speed in marketing now supersedes the desire for perfection.

‘Systems Thinking’ Unpacked

It’s easy to be intimidated by the academics of marketing — the four As, the four Ps, x number of Cs, templates, frameworks, and more — until you realize a basic fact: the consumer experience you deliver is a reflection of who you are as a brand, as an organization. I may not have always understood the nuances of marketing, but as an engineer I could see how fragmented it was. I could see all the different parts and I at least knew how to stitch them together.

I saw how brands had data but they had no insights that were actionable. If they were lucky enough to have insights, they did not have the pipes that would feed these insights into media buying or personalizing the consumer experience. For most brands, online and offline were two isolated worlds, but not for the consumer. These were all different teams, building different parts for their respective outputs and goals that never came together to deliver an integrated, seamless and frictionless consumer experience that would inspire behavioral change.

That’s ‘Systems Thinking’, which became marketing for me.

Let me put it another way: Companies are trying to sell a tire, a chassis, an axle or a steering wheel; but, at the end of the day, people are looking for a fully assembled car. And most businesses only have pieces of the car; they also don’t have the blueprint for what the car looks like, let alone having a car that they can then sell to the consumer.

It’s what I call “the engineering of marketing”. It’s not subjective, it is measurable. It should be held accountable for outcomes — not outputs.

Here’s where an engineer’s mindset helps to put all the components together so companies can build a car a.k.a. the ultimate consumer experience. Remember, the buyers are not focused on the greatest tire or the best car seat — they are trying to get from Place A to Place B, for which they need an entire car.

And then came the second inflection point.

‘Serendipity of Marketing’

The experience as a Chief Marketing Technologist taught me how marketing and technology could impact human behavior. But it was my time at Spotify, starting in 2016, that shaped me tremendously as a marketer, thanks largely to Seth Farbman, ex-CMO at Spotify. It made me realize the value of a purpose-driven brand that is not merely part of a culture but is actively shaping culture. It also taught me that data, science and technology can drive mechanical growth for a company, but the irrationality and serendipity of marketing helps build an emotional and cultural connection with a brand, which in turn generates long-term sustained growth.

Exponential growth occurs when you grow the brand, the user base and the user value — it’s not an either-or situation.

Another take away for me from Daniel Ek, Spotify’s co-founder and CEO, is the fact that the only moat surrounding an organization in this day and age is its ability to move faster than the competition — everything else just becomes a commodity at one point or another.

Companies and leaders can no longer be afraid of chaos; they need to harness it. Exponential speed and growth cannot work alongside excessive structure and organization.

That can only happen when people have trust within the leadership; when they have the freedom to fail, and when those failures are celebrated as much as successes.

Marketing needs to protect and reflect a company’s culture — both internally and externally — and reflect its values and belief system through the brand. The culture you intend to shape with your brand is a reflection of the culture you build internally. That’s what creates resilient brands that will stand the test of time.

The art and science of leadership lies in how you build a culture that inspire the ability and appetite to run at 100 mph when you can only see 10 feet ahead.

At the same time, CEOs should hold marketing teams accountable for the overarching growth of businesses. Connect the growth of a cultural brand with the growth of your business and use science to prove that incrementality. The two should not and cannot be isolated anymore.

My understanding of marketing has been built on real-life experiences and mistakes on the fly. And there could not have been a better platform for me than Freshly, where I joined in January 2019. With an authentic purpose and mission to change people’s lives by inspiring and enabling them to eat healthier, it has given me and my team a beautiful canvas to draw out our orchestration of modern marketing. An engineer’s world of marketing.

Originally published at https://medium.com on April 19, 2019.

When You Market to Grow

I started my career as an engineer, glaring at black and blue screens scanning log files, analyzing and tuning JVM crashes, recovering databases. Many of these resulted from memory leaks in my own code (lessons learned for life). Gradually steered towards technology that would redefine the world of advertising and marketing; product managing Adtech and Martech platforms; from ad servers, search bid management systems to CRM and analytics/BI solutions. My perspective in all those years started and ended with technology — latest web/app servers, design patterns, latest frameworks, languages and more. I wanted to do everything possible with technology for the sake of technology. It was all about the “Output” and not the “Outcome”. I learned my lesson the hard way as I got closer to the business and was held accountable for results and impact. The infatuation and excitement of technology alone did not matter anymore.

Having crawled my way into the world of marketing and business growth; I see many making the same mistake. We are confusing Marketing’s Outputs from Marketing’s Outcomes. There is a greater focus on doing “things”; the next big global campaign, a brilliant creative idea, testing a cutting edge AI decision or technology.

Marketing needs to dramatically evolve from the days of the Mad Men to being core to an organization’s GROWTH ENGINE. It is a complex (not complicated) integration of many parts and pieces -data, insights, tech, content, creative, storytelling, channels, media, planning, analytics etc that in isolation don’t mean much. It is no longer one-dimensional or linear. It needs to be held accountable for impact and outcomes. This mindset shift is not a choice but a quintessential response to surviving in a consumer-led era. Money and the multi-million dollar campaign can no longer buy love or loyalty. The consumer is in full control and command.

Let’s not confuse Marketing’s Outcomes from the Outputs. Here is how I define them; over the next few weeks, I will share deep-dives into each one of these:

Marketing’s desired OUTCOME is ultimately GROWTH

Why else would or should you market? These are the 3 simple reasons why marketing should exist:

1. Create New Demand with consumers who would not organically come into your world — Inspire and influence your non-core audience in the outer circles who don’t even consider your product.

2. Capture the Demand that is Ready & Waiting, you believe you have the right to win them now. Acquire these users in the most efficient and effective way possible.

3. Retain, Engage and Amplify Demand by continuously maximizing user value, that will increase engagement, which will increase retention, loyalty and lifetime value. And if your stars aligned, your existing user base will become your biggest marketing channel.

Before I get pinned down for not talking about the brand, shaping culture, defining purpose; that’s part of the foundation to get to these outcomes. I summarize that strategy in 3 broad intertwined buckets:

· Grow the Brand — Leverage the power of your brand, it’s bigger purpose and personality, it’s connection and influence on culture and society to ultimately inspire audiences in those outer circles. There is a reason why they are in the outer circles.

Before the functional value, you need the brand to connect emotionally and culturally to start the relationship.

This is the serendipitous and at times irrational part of marketing that cannot be subdued. The watch out is when you over index on building the brand with no accountability or understanding of the business impact or outcome.

· Grow the User Base — In a 1–2 punch, this capitalizes on top of a strong brand, capturing the demand that has been created (caveat — you may have a different approach if you’re still in your 0–1 stage as a startup, there may not be a brand just yet). Bring them home. Establish this as an always-on engine, intertwining data, science, technology with personalized content and storytelling, experiments and iterations to drive efficiency and effectiveness. Think both organic and paid growth, applying the flywheel principles.

· Grow the User Value — Retention is hard and building loyalists and advocates harder. There is little marketing can do if the product isn’t sticky, but just a great product cannot drive stronger engagement alone. You have to continuously add value to the most loyal users, not only the ones at risk. Ensure the expectations match the experience, that prevents churn. Apply the understanding of your micro-segments with relevant messaging on and off platform, demonstrate value to bring them back, one more time and one more time. Incentivize behavior and think virality.

The big question — what comes first, what should I prioritize, should I invest in growing the brand or growing the user base? The simple answer — it all depends J. If you’re a startup in the 0–1 Pre-PMF phase, you invest everything you have in your product, build a core user base, optimize your product and let the experience build the brand. This is when your funnel gets inversed.

But if you’re in the 1-N Post-PMF phase; ready to scale across segments and markets; then you absolutely need the power of your brand as the foundation for your subsequent scale. Pure performance and a great product with no cultural and emotional bond can only get you this far.

More to be discussed in the follow up deep-dive post. In the future post, I will dig more into:

· The inter-dependencies of Demand Creation and Demand Capture.

· How best to distribute your investment?

· How do you measure the impact and incrementality of either?

· How does it vary by market maturity and more?

What “outcomes” do you hold your marketing function accountable for?

Marketing’s OUTPUTs — enabling the OUTCOMES

Here are 10 of many outputs/enablers for marketing that drive the OUTCOME, in no specific order.

1. Don’t Isolate but Amplify Brand and Performance (demand creation x capture x retention) — of course based on where you’re in your growth curve. For instance, as a startup, do you need brand marketing before reaching product-market fit or can you even afford it; great POV from Andrew Chen on brand marketing for a startup. In a mature market, what should you spend on brand vs performance where most of your addressable audience has high awareness and consideration levels? On the flip side, can you scale your product from 0–1 to 1-N without the foundation of a culturally and emotionally connected, purpose driven brand? Your brand should reflect your belief system; provide a common purpose that serves as the underlying platform for meaningful expression and conversation with the users. Does your growth efforts and performance spend benefit from a strong brand (efficiency and/or effectiveness or organic growth)? Are you able to measure and correlate?

Think about the 80–20 rule when it comes to budget distribution — if you can spend 80% of your marketing dollar on everything that is measurable and can be optimized to get to the “OUTCOMEs”, you can spend 20% however you want. Because, 100% of marketing will NEVER be measurable (there is no need).

2. Define clear KPIs and Measurement strategy for both Outputs & Outcomes with Leading and Lagging Indicators — Throughout the demand curve (creation to retention), hold marketing accountable to specific KPIs quarter by quarter. What are your leading vs lagging indicators, what can marketing influence? What is the incrementality of marketing? What channel plays what role for what type of user? Use data and analysis to not just understand what happened in the past (rear view), but to plan ahead. Become agile, measure, analyze and optimize towards the “outcome”.

· Measure the Brand — How much is your brand loved and trusted? Do the users feel connected with the brand; do they relate to your brand’s purpose? How does the strength of your brand vary from market to market and does that reflect in your performance results? Have you run tests to prove correlation between brand KPIs (awareness, consideration, trust etc) to performance KPIs (CAC, SAC, CPR etc).

· Measure the User Base — Size of users trying, registering, subscribing or buying your product. Depending on the nature of your business, this could also include revenue growth, # units sold etc. Measure not only the volume and cost of users (efficiency) but also the effectiveness (quality — user states of acquired users, engagement, retention levels). Understand the quality of paid vs organic users, are the retention rates at par? What role does each channel play; think beyond the last-click model into multi-touch attribution. Test and iterate to understand channel spend thresholds beyond which it becomes inefficient.

· Measure the User Value — Percentage of users coming back to use, renew subscription or buy more product; a sign of delivered and evolving user value and ultimately a product-market fit. Differentiate causality vs correlation when digging into churn rates. Do you understand your user base beyond active or inactive — apply user states and cohorts based on engagement levels. Think LTV beyond financial metrics — a brilliant article on capturing Total Customer Engagement Value.

3 Differentiate Leading vs Lagging Indicators — The above gives you a broad spectrum of KPIs to measure across the 3 pillars of brand, user growth and user value. But it’s equally important to differentiate the leading versus lagging indicators of growth.

Every business usually has a North Star Metric they revolve around for example, Monthly Active Users (MAU), ARR, Total Subscriptions etc. While they are extremely useful to align an entire organization together in one direction, they are lagging indicators of growth.

For a positive or negative “effect” on these metrics, the “causes” would have happened many months prior. Marketing should be focused on monitoring, analyzing and optimizing leading indicators to influence/impact growth outcomes. For example MAU:DAU ratio, user engagement rates, specific user behavior on platform, for an eCommerce site this could be the number of reviews left by SKU and more.

To maximize your outcome (lagging KPIs), you need to optimize your input (leading KPIs).

Your Lagging Indicators (North Star Metric) is data relevant to analysts outside your company (WallStreet for instance) while your leading indicators are relevant to analysts within your company to influence proactive change in your growth trajectory. Brian Balfour in this article uses a simple analogy — the Ecosystem of Serengeti to explain the point.

4. Leverage data, technology and content to become ALWAYS-ON — Marketing can no longer be restricted to start and end dates of a campaign, give the user what they need before they know they need it. It’s an evolution from a pure push mindset of marketing with the brand at the center to a pull mindset with the user truly at the center. There is a reason why “customer centricity” is still largely a theory for most brands, it is DIFFICULT because it requires the underlying ecosystem of marketing to operate (as an engine) and not any single part in isolation.

Marketing needs to avoid creating the “valley of death” in between traditional campaigns and become “always-on” engines that constantly drive user value.

Shared a bit about that in one of my posts on AdAge last year.

5. Understand your audience, the “why” behind the “what” — Getting deeper into Causality vs Correlation, becoming an outside-in org (more difficult) and not an inside-out org (much easier). Apply the science (1st and 2nd party data, Qual & Quant research, experimentation and iterations) to define the WHO you should win as users, the WHAT are their needs and barriers and most importantly the WHY behind that WHAT — why are they coming and staying, why are others coming and leaving and why are those not coming at all?

Become “consumer obsessed”, identify your users beyond being Active or Inactive. Identify user states & cohorts along with user value — power, core, casual, lapse users where the states can be defined by specific on and off platform user behavior.

6. Convert Your Linear Funnel into a Flywheel | Organic and Paid Growth — Of course, who would not want to have an organic funnel that feeds itself; that’s a dream for any product. However:

· It’s not always possible to have organic growth (either via loops/flywheels or network effect) on the get go, every startup should continue to strive for that as that’s the only way to drive sustainable growth

· At the same time, “paid growth” or performance marketing driven growth isn’t always bad either as long as you ensure it’s not linear. You do that by ensuring the quality of your paid users are at par (almost) with your organic users. And if you did that, you have higher probability of converting your liner paid funnel into a cyclic flywheel — rewarding every paid user to bring another user organically or through a network effect

Having an efficient and effective paid lever is also a tactical lever that can be applied in specific growth crunch situations; depending on your scale you may “pay your way to growth” for a short period as a tactical move (not sustainable).

7. You can buy Acquisition (first date) but you cannot buy Retention (love & relationship) — There is nothing more difficult in overarching growth for any business than the art and science of bring a user back one more time and one more time; driving engagement, building habits and ultimately lifetime value. It requires constantly adding value not only to your users at risk but to your most loyal user — she is constantly under warranty and “day one” companies (as Jeff Bezos called Amazon) constantly push the envelope to add that incremental value.

Building that trusted relationship is a beast of a journey, it’s not a piece of technology, database or a tactic.

There are a lot of products and platforms are there that inspire stickiness at the core of their experience, the more you use it, the more value you get. However, rewarding behavior as a core tenet to inspiring behavior is still lacking in most platforms. A great post by Todd Lutwak (partner at Andreessen Horowitz and ex-eBay exec) — The Lion, The Platform, and The Lesson talks about that underlying principle.

8. Organize Around Outcomes/Objectives and Not Channels — Avoid the temptation to organize, structure and plan around channels, instead organize around tangible business/growth outcomes. Consumers don’t think channels, they see convenience, value and experiences.

The experiences you deliver are a reflection of how you are organized and how you operate.

Growth is a cross functional outcome; no single function can drive scaled growth in isolation. Create cross functional teams/pods/squads that may include product, engineering, data analysts, research, media, performance, content etc but have a single objective that leads to a clearly defined set of KPIs. This is why Marketing needs growth planning and not media planning.

9. Experiment, Analyze and Iterate — One thing marketing needs to learn from product — there is no such thing as “perfection”, it’s only “experimentation” and “rapid iteration”. There is no amount of insight or creative thinking that can guarantee the right message to the right user at the right time. You just have to test your way to get that. Let the data influence your strategy — that is the real oil that will fuel your growth.

10. Don’t isolate Marketing from Technology — Cannot underestimate the value of an underlying Marketing/Communication Technology Ecosystem; without that you can have the insight, know the consumer, have the budget, have the message/creative BUT you will not be able to reach them, because you do not have the pipe.

Look out for more deep-dives to come on each one of these enablers over the next few months.

Having crawled my way into the world of marketing and business growth; I see many making the same mistake. We are confusing Marketing’s Outputs from Marketing’s Outcomes. There is a greater focus on doing “things”; the next big global campaign, a brilliant creative idea, testing a cutting edge AI decision or technology.

Marketing needs to dramatically evolve from the days of the Mad Men to being core to an organization’s GROWTH ENGINE. It is a complex (not complicated) integration of many parts and pieces -data, insights, tech, content, creative, storytelling, channels, media, planning, analytics etc that in isolation don’t mean much. It is no longer one-dimensional or linear. It needs to be held accountable for impact and outcomes. This mindset shift is not a choice but a quintessential response to surviving in a consumer-led era. Money and the multi-million dollar campaigns can no longer buy love or loyalty. The consumer is in full control and command.

Marketing’s desired OUTCOME is ultimately GROWTH

Why else would or should you market? These are the 3 simple reasons why marketing should exist:

1. Create New Demand with consumers who would not organically come into your world — Inspire and influence your non-core audience in the outer circles who don’t even consider your product.

2. Capture the Demand that is Ready & Waiting, you believe you have the right to win them now. Acquire these users in the most efficient and effective way possible.

3. Retain, Engage and Amplify Demand by continuously maximizing user value, that will increase engagement, which will increase retention, loyalty and lifetime value. And if your stars aligned, your existing user base will become your biggest marketing channel.

Before I get pinned down for not talking about the brand, shaping culture, defining purpose; that’s part of the foundation to get to these outcomes. I summarize that strategy in 3 broad intertwined buckets:

· Grow the Brand — Leverage the power of your brand, it’s bigger purpose and personality, it’s connection and influence on culture and society to ultimately inspire audiences in those outer circles. There is a reason why they are in the outer circles. Before the functional value, you need the brand to connect emotionally and culturally to start the relationship. This is the serendipitous and at times irrational part of marketing that cannot be subdued. The watch out is when you over index on building the brand with no accountability or understanding of the business impact or outcome.

· Grow the User Base — In a 1–2 punch, this capitalizes on top of a strong brand, capturing the demand that has been created (caveat — you may have a different approach if you’re still in your 0–1 stage as a startup, there may not be a brand just yet). Bring them home. Establish this as an always-on engine, intertwining data, science, technology with personalized content and storytelling, experiments and iterations to drive efficiency and effectiveness. Think both organic and paid growth, applying the flywheel principles.

· Grow the User Value — Retention is hard and building loyalists and advocates harder. There is little marketing can do if the product isn’t sticky, but just a great product cannot drive stronger engagement alone. You have to continuously add value to the most loyal users, not only the ones at risk. Ensure the expectations match the experience, that prevents churn. Apply the understanding of your micro-segments with relevant messaging on and off platform, demonstrate value to bring them back, one more time and one more time. Incentivize behavior and think virality.

The big question — what comes first, what should I prioritize, should I invest in growing the brand or growing the user base? The simple answer — it all depends J. If you’re a startup in the 0–1 Pre-PMF phase, you invest everything you have in your product, build a core user base, optimize your product and let the experience build the brand. But if you’re in the 1-N Post-PMF phase; ready to scale across segments and markets; then you absolutely need the power of your brand as the foundation for your subsequent scale. Pure performance and a great product with no cultural and emotional bond can only get you this far.

More to be discussed in the follow up deep-dive post. In the future post, I will dig more into:

· The inter-dependencies of Demand Creation and Demand Capture.

· How best to distribute your investment?

· How do you measure the impact and incrementality of either?

· How does it vary by market maturity and more?

What “outcomes” do you hold your marketing function accountable for?

Marketing’s OUTPUTs — here are 10 of many outputs/enablers for marketing that drive the OUTCOME, in no specific order.

1. Don’t Isolate but Amplify Brand and Performance (demand creation x capture x retention) — of course based on where you’re in your growth curve. For instance, as a startup, do you need brand marketing before reaching product-market fit or can you even afford it; great POV from Andrew Chen on brand marketing for a startup. In a mature market, what should you spend on brand vs performance where most of your addressable audience has high awareness and consideration levels? On the flip side, can you scale your product from 0–1 to 1-N without the foundation of a culturally and emotionally connected, purpose driven brand? Does your growth efforts and performance spend benefit from a strong brand (efficiency and/or effectiveness or organic growth)? Are you able to measure and correlate?

Think about the 80–20 rule when it comes to budget distribution — if you can spend 80% of your marketing dollar on everything that is measurable and can be optimized to get to the “OUTCOMEs”, you can spend 20% however you want. Because, 100% of marketing will NEVER be measurable (there is no need).

2. Define clear KPIs and Measurement strategy for both Outputs & Outcomes with Leading and Lagging Indicators — Throughout the demand curve (creation to retention), hold marketing accountable to specific KPIs quarter by quarter. What are your leading vs lagging indicators, what can marketing influence? What is the incrementality of marketing? What channel plays what role for what type of user? Use data and analysis to not just understand what happened in the past (rear view), but to plan ahead. Become agile, measure, analyze and optimize towards the “outcome”.

· Measure the Brand — How much is your brand loved and trusted? Do the users feel connected with the brand; do they relate to your brand’s purpose? How does the strength of your brand vary from market to market and does that reflect in your performance results? Have you run tests to prove correlation between brand KPIs (awareness, consideration, trust etc) to performance KPIs (CAC, SAC, CPR etc).

· Measure the User Base — Size of users trying, registering, subscribing or buying your product. Depending on the nature of your business, this could also include revenue growth, # units sold etc. Measure not only the volume and cost of users (efficiency) but also the effectiveness (quality — user states of acquired users, engagement, retention levels). Understand the quality of paid vs organic users, are the retention rates at par? What role does each channel play; think beyond the last-click model into multi-touch attribution. Test and iterate to understand channel spend thresholds beyond which it becomes inefficient.

· Measure the User Value — Percentage of users coming back to use, renew subscription or buy more product; a sign of delivered and evolving user value and ultimately a product-market fit. Differentiate causality vs correlation when digging into churn rates. Do you understand your user base beyond active or inactive — apply user states and cohorts based on engagement levels. Think LTV beyond financial metrics — a brilliant article on capturing Total Customer Engagement Value.

3. Differentiate Leading vs Lagging Indicators — The above gives you a broad spectrum of KPIs to measure across the 3 pillars of brand, user growth and user value. But it’s equally important to differentiate the leading versus lagging indicators of growth.

Every business usually has a North Star Metric they revolve around for example, Monthly Active Users (MAU), ARR, Total Subscriptions etc. While they are extremely useful to align an entire organization together in one direction, they are lagging indicators of growth.

For a positive or negative “effect” on these metrics, the “causes” would have happened many months prior. Marketing should be focused on monitoring, analyzing and optimizing leading indicators to influence/impact growth outcomes. For example MAU:DAU ratio, user engagement rates, specific user behavior on platform, for an eCommerce site this could be the number of reviews left by SKU and more.

To maximize your outcome (lagging KPIs), you need to optimize your input (leading KPIs). Your Lagging Indicators (North Star Metric) is data relevant to analysts outside your company (WallStreet for instance) while your leading indicators are relevant to analysts within your company to influence proactive change in your growth trajectory. Brian Balfour in this article uses a simple analogy — the Ecosystem of Serengeti to explain the point.

4. Leverage data, technology and content to become ALWAYS-ON — Marketing can no longer be restricted to start and end dates of a campaign, give the user what they need before they know they need it. It’s an evolution from a pure push mindset of marketing with the brand at the center to a pull mindset with the user truly at the center. There is a reason why “customer centricity” is still largely a theory for most brands, it is DIFFICULT because it requires the underlying ecosystem of marketing to operate (as an engine) and not any single part in isolation. Marketing needs to avoid creating the “valley of death” in between traditional campaigns and become “always-on” engines that constantly drive user value. Shared a bit about that in one of my posts on AdAge last year.

5. Understand your audience, the “why” behind the “what” — Getting deeper into Causality vs Correlation, becoming an outside-in org (more difficult) and not an inside-out org (much easier). Apply the science (1st and 2nd party data, Qual & Quant research, experimentation and iterations) to define the WHO you should win as users, the WHAT are their needs and barriers and most importantly the WHY behind that WHAT — why are they coming and staying, why are others coming and leaving and why are those not coming at all?

Become “consumer obsessed”, identify your users beyond being Active or Inactive. Identify user states & cohorts along with user value — power, core, casual, lapse users where the states can be defined by specific on and off platform user behavior.

6. Convert Your Linear Funnel into a Flywheel | Organic and Paid Growth — Of course, who would not want to have an organic funnel that feeds itself; that’s a dream for any product. However:

· It’s not always possible to have organic growth (either via loops/flywheels or network effect) on the get go, every startup should continue to strive for that as that’s the only way to drive sustainable growth

· At the same time, “paid growth” or performance marketing driven growth isn’t always bad either as long as you ensure it’s not linear. You do that by ensuring the quality of your paid users are at par (almost) with your organic users. And if you did that, you have higher probability of converting your liner paid funnel into a cyclic flywheel — rewarding every paid user to bring another user organically or through a network effect

Having an efficient and effective paid lever is also a tactical lever that can be applied in specific growth crunch situations; depending on your scale you may “pay your way to growth” for a short period as a tactical move (not sustainable).

7. You can buy Acquisition (first date) but you cannot buy Retention (love & relationship) — There is nothing more difficult in overarching growth for any business than the art and science of bring a user back one more time and one more time; driving engagement, building habits and ultimately lifetime value. It requires constantly adding value not only to your users at risk but to your most loyal user — she is constantly under warranty and “day one” companies (as Jeff Bezos called Amazon) constantly push the envelope to add that incremental value.

Building that trusted relationship is a journey, it’s not a piece of technology, database or a tactic.

There are a lot of products and platforms are there that inspire stickiness at the core of their experience, the more you use it, the more value you get. However, rewarding behavior as a core tenet to inspiring behavior is still lacking in most platforms. A great post by Todd Lutwak (partner at Andreessen Horowitz and ex-eBay exec) — The Lion, The Platform, and The Lesson talks about that underlying principle.

8. Organize Around Outcomes/Objectives and Not Channels — Avoid the temptation to organize, structure and plan around channels, instead organize around tangible business/growth outcomes. Consumers don’t think channels, they see convenience, value and experiences. The experiences you deliver are a reflection of how you are organized and how you operate. Growth is a cross functional outcome; create cross functional teams/pods/squads that may include product, engineering, data analysts, research, media, performance, content etc but have a single objective that leads to a clearly defined set of KPIs.

9. Experiment, Analyze and Iterate — One thing marketing needs to learn from product — there is no such thing as “perfection”, it’s only “experimentation” and “rapid iteration”. There is no amount of insight or creative thinking that can guarantee the right message to the right user at the right time. You just have to test your way to get that. Let the data influence your strategy — that is the real oil that will fuel your growth.

10. Don’t isolate Marketing from Technology — Cannot underestimate the value of an underlying Marketing/Communication Technology Ecosystem; without that you can have the insight, know the consumer, have the budget, have the message/creative BUT you will not be able to reach them, because you do not have the pipe.

Look out for more deep-dives to come on each one of these enablers over the next few months.

Customer (used to refer to a “user” throughout the post) Relationship is the core of marketing (however you define it). And I won’t be amiss if I said CRM is the core of building Customer Relationship. Some of you may say, what’s the difference. You are right, what’s the difference. But in reality, it is unfortunately dramatically different.

For many, CRM is a capability, a channel, a technology/software or a thing while Customer Relationship is an outcome you have to work really hard for. You have to earn it. I recently shared my perspective on CRM as an underlying philosophy and mindset. Why there is no such thing as a CRM campaign and why CRM is NOT a technology or a channel.

Brands need to work hard to build trust and be relevant at every single interaction and even harder in-between those interactions in anticipation and predicting what the user may need and expect. CRM is an always-on “user obsession” that challenges you as a brand to think about elevating the user experience for your most loyal user, not just the one at risk. It requires empathy and deep understanding of what inspires your user to come back and what disappointed some to churn and never come back. This mindset is channel agnostic. It is journey agnostic, what you do in the process to acquire a user is as relevant as what you do post acquisition. It needs technology, it itself is not technology.

Most start-ups struggle to follow the blue trajectory ie stop the churn after a certain percentage and maintain a steady state of daily and monthly active users. That retention curve is a start-up dream. While the product plays the most critical role in driving retention, data-driven messaging that is relevant, timely and contextual builds the overall experience.

Acquiring is easy (relatively speaking), continuously engaging and then retaining is extremely difficult (again relatively speaking). CRM is retention, it is lifetime value management, it is a key indicator of product-market fit, it is an OUTCOME which is GROWTH.

Brands that build this relationship that leads to trust and loyalty benefit from organic growth. This is when your loyal users bring more users through WOM or other product driven loops. Another sign of a healthy product-market fit.

Of course easier said than done. There are many reasons why 90% of brands still struggle with user relationship, retention rates and repeat habits that drive breakthrough growth.

At the core of these challenges it’s a mindset that limits CRM to a commodity:

• Sending promotional and/or triggered emails, direct mail or SMS to a group of consumers is CRM.
• “CRM campaigns” are separate and isolated from consumer marketing or advertising efforts.
• Having a database that stores consumer information is considered CRM.
• Buying/renting a marketing automation software is doing CRM.
• Sending emails or direct mails is CRM.
• It only begins when you become a user.

Key Principles for Transforming CRM into Growth

Understand Your User — Holistic Segmentation Strategy that is Actionable

There are no short cuts here. We all think we understand our users, their needs, behavior and barriers. We really don’t. Simply because our understanding is isolated by channel, isolated by systems that are storing siloed pieces of user data.

A holistic understanding and segmentation requires a holistic data set, that cuts across channels, systems, data sources (1st party, 2nd party, 3rd party), across qualitative and quantitative research. Remember that it is the same user, going through a unified journey to solve an emotional or functional need.

Once you’ve established your segments and cohorts, slicing and dicing your user base based on demographic, habits, behavior etc etc; how much of that is actionable? Are your segments purely altitudinal or have you overlaid these segments on top of your 1st party data to know exactly who your existing user base is. If you don’t understand your existing user, you will not understand your future user.

Define & Understand Movement of Users Across User States

Brands often look at user base as active or inactive; daily active (DAU), weekly active (WAU), monthly active (MAU). Based on the nature of the platform, these can be lagging indicators. To drive stronger engagement, brands need to understand more micro user states that may take many behavioral, attitudinal variables into account.

The user state definition can be static rules using these variables or an ML based algorithm; more importantly should be re-evaluated on a frequency that matches your ideal platform usage frequency (daily, weekly or monthly?).

The triggered messaging (across whatever appropriate channel — push, in-app, email, social, DM) can happen within user states (relative engagement level/score deviates beyond an acceptable limit) or even more importantly as users move in-between states; a core user deviating to casual is a leading indicator of potential churn/lapsed state.

A user state level messaging strategy is more scalable, dynamic and can alleviate the complexity of real time decision making within your messaging platform. The user states are evaluated within the data layer; de-coupling the messaging platform from actual decisions (a perpetual pain-point for high traffic and engaging platforms with multiple behavioral variables).

CRM is Channel Agnostic but think User Protection & Governance

CRM is not a channel and cannot/should not be organized, planned and executed like one. You need to meet and exceed expectations wherever your user may be; online or offline, across social, direct mail or email or on your platform. You need to leverage user data and insight from all channels and touch points; transform that data into information and insight. Then deliver the most immersive and relevant experience back through any and all of these channels.

While you overcome that obstacle and become channel agnostic, you need to think “user protection” in parallel. Just because the user has opted-in across channels does not mean you bombard the user with messages. Implement user protection both within a channel (relatively easy since this is managed through a single platform and often one team) as well as across channels; often more difficult because the communication happens through multiple systems and often by more than one team. True user protection needs underlying processes across teams and an underlying system that connects “user response data” from different channels. It also requires data matching/mastering across known identities (email address, userIDs/GUIDs, cookie ID, device IDs, mailing address) to create a universal user profile with every single interaction mapped back to the user.

User protection is balancing the frequency of user communication across channels, not just over communication but also under communication.

Experimentation, Measurement and Optimization for Better Retention Rates

The cliché of “right message to the right user through the right channel at the right time” is still valid. But there is no simple way to execute it. The right message to the right user is only as good and as real as your next experiment. No amount of analysis, hypothesis and expertise can get it right the first time every time. What you do get right is the process of experimentation; test, test and then test again. Test different variations of the message to the same segment. Test the same message to different segments and see what works. Test different trigger points with specific channels and see what drives better engagement and response. For instance, certain channels may be more effective for re-activation while others like in-app messaging may drive better engagement and habit creation.

Next Best Message with Machine Learning

Nothing can predict the future better than the past. You can take all past variables, permutations and combinations as inputs (what message worked with what type of user, through what channel at what time within what demographic) and use ML to determine what may be the most appropriate and best next message for an individual user. IBM Watson’s similarity analytics is a potential capability that takes past performance to automate subsequent communication.

The Technology Impediment

Believe it or not, the underlying CRM technology especially for more triggered and automated messaging is still underwhelming at least for certain types of businesses. It has come a long way for more traditional eCommerce platforms; sending cart abandonment follow up communication, targeting and retargeting. It is still a challenge for more complex, more interactive and engaging mobile platforms with far more behavioral triggers. They have more complex (variety, volume) user level on and off-platform data. Most messaging platforms require this first party data to be loaded into the cloud which in itself could be a challenge. Lastly, the real time decision making using these behavioral attributes also becomes a bottleneck when the scale goes beyond a few hundred million users. This is when you have to choose between a build vs buy/rent vs hybrid approach.

CRM connects to everything — Horizontal Organizational Model

You cannot establish the CRM capability in a vertical silo, it needs to be a horizontal orchestration within your org model that touches and connects with everything a user does. More often a CRM team is responsible for email and DM communication. Instead, it should be a function that sits underneath every channel execution team; responsible for the overarching user experience and user protection.

Closing

Advancement in data, technology and media has put the user at the center of the ecosystem. It has given the user tremendous choice and control with high expectations. This leads to a whole new world of “Customer Relationship Management” as a fundamental strategy and objective, way beyond an individual tool or tactic as the acronym “CRM” may suggest at times. When done right, Customer Relationship is a growth outcome. There is no better growth lever than a user organically bringing more users into the system. For that to happen, brands need to earn and build Customer Relationship.

Click here to view other posts from Mayur Gupta.

Hear Mayur speak in person alongside other growth experts at the 2018 GrowthHackers Conference! Learn more and register today »

When Customer Relationship Means Growth was originally published in Growth Hackers on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Marketing Now Means Growth

Evolution in data and technology has changed the world of marketing. Marketing’s impact is now quantified, measurable and attributable. It is not just impact top of the funnel brand awareness but the lower half as well driving performance — conversion, retention and GROWTH. Marketing can now leverage data to micro-target and bring selective users with relatively higher lifetime value through the funnel. It also uses a deep understanding of user expectations and behavior to influence user onboarding, activation and long term retention with contextual and personalized messaging and experiences through the journey. As brands build these user relationships and earn loyalty; marketing influences users to amplify and become advocates.

The KPIs for marketing’s own performance are no longer limited to NPS scores, brand awareness and/or affinity. Even the more quantitative measures like open rates, CTRs, unique visits are now deemed vanity KPIs. Instead, Marketing is now accountable for and hence measuring installs, registrations, subs, conversion rates, average order size, DAU (D1, WAU D14, D60 etc), MAU, LTV, reactivation rate or addressing churn rates and others. If you’re an eCommerce player, these could be conversion rates, sales/SKU, basket size, LTV, repeat purchases, cart abandonment by cohort etc. There is a fundamental shift from defining vanity success to real growth, well shared in this blog on kissmetrics. Marketing is now a critical component of getting to a Product-Market fit. It centers around the user; protects the user and thrives on user obsession.

Do you really care about the spike in site traffic without looking at what it did or did not do to your conversion rates or net sales? For all you know, it was a bot that drove the spike while your true conversions during that time are actually decelerating.

courtesy https://blog.kissmetrics.com/vainest-metrics/

Any marketing function that does not drive growth will soon be replaced; with new people with the right skills and remit needed to drive growth. At times even if that means re-skinning the cat in case of Coke but more than the title it is the core mission of the function and accountability that drives sustainable breakthrough growth. Even for a traditional marketing giant like Coke, marketing now means innovation, data science, technology all coming together to growth the business. Isn’t every company a data and technology company now regardless of vertical?

Keeping it simple, I define growth in these 3 buckets:

1. Grow the Brand
2. Grow the User Base
3. Grow Retention & LTV

Pivotal Role of Data in Marketing’s Transformation Towards a Growth Engine

Here are the 2 ways data has transformed marketing into Art X Science and brought it closer to tangible and measurable growth:

DATA AS AN INPUT has made marketing RELEVANT & CONTEXTUAL — For the longest time marketing had been plagued with traditional mass marketing; focused on reach than relevancy, being intrusive and not contextual or personalized. Data has changed that. Advanced research and behavioral science capabilities, predictive models, qual and quant analysis has enabled a holistic understanding of the user (probably 360 degree X 2). The advancement in data management platforms; data matching capabilities across known and anonymous data, across online and offline data, across devices and cookie IDs has shifted a segmented view of a user to an individual view of the user.

A big reason why users churn is when their Expectations do not match the Experience. Marketing now has the ability to understand “EXPECTATIONS” before it delivers the “EXPERIENCE” — a big shift forward.

A big caveat of course is how many marketing functions are able to transform data into insights and subsequently action on it. Acquiring and having data is only step 1 of many steps in the supply chain of growth marketing.

DATA AS AN OUTPUT has made marketing MEASURABLE & ATTRIUTABLE — Despite an extremely fragmented media and channel landscape; marketing has evolved into a measurable and attributable function. It is no longer an ROI black box. The advancement in measurement and analytics platforms has allowed for not only cross channel measurement, JIT if not Real Time Analysis but also multi-touch attribution (granted with certain caveats). Attribution is no longer limited to the last-click model; injecting new measurement and predictive algorithms in a typical multi-touch conversion funnel. Brands are now measuring the causal impact of their brand awareness efforts on tangible performance and user growth (acquisition, engagement & retention). This has brought an underlying shift from just measuring vanity KPIs like site visits, CTRs, CPM, Email Open Rates to growth KPIs like DAU (daily active users), MAU, Reg Rate by LTV, Cost Per Sub, Retention Rates etc. There is a quest to understand and identify the true North Star KPI and shifting marketing plans to address that.

Josh Elman, General Partner at Greylock shared a growth measurement and analytics framework that I thought was spot on. He defines a measurement framework with 3 key levers:

1. Purpose — Understanding Core Value Proposition for your Product, without this your product will not exist
2. Core Action — The one action you want your users to take as soon as possible
3. Cycle — How often/frequently do you want them to take that action

If Marketing (of course in partnership with other parts of the organization especially Product) can help define these 3 core levers and re-pivot itself to optimize against them, it starts to operate like a “growth engine”. Josh’s example on Linkedin explains:

Marketing as a Sustainable Growth Engine is Still Not Mainstream. Why?

Despite all these possibilities; availability of data, technology and more converging talent (at the intersection of marketing, data and technology); many marketing functions still struggle to propel growth. Big reason — marketing is still fundamentally fragmented; most marketers and marketing functions on either side of the fence (agency or brand) are still orchestrated around “channels” and “media” and not the user or growth for that matter. The operating models, partnerships and engagement models, annual budgets and plans, incentivization structures; everything is still isolated by channel and media types. Each fragment likes to put the user at the center of its own myopic world; ultimately delivering a broken experience and slow incremental growth at best.

Shift from Media Planning to Growth Planning — Growth Orchestrators

The proliferation in the media and channel landscape has opened new touchpoints to engage users; ingest signals at each one of those touch-points to deliver more progressive and immersive experiences. On the flip side, this has led to further fragmentation of the marketing and advertiser ecosystem.

Marketing needs a fundamental shift from this channel obsession to “user obsession” that will lead to growth. It needs to evolve from Media Planners and Media Planning to “Growth Orchestrators and Growth Planning”.The growth orchestrators are measured, incentivized and held accountable for overarching brand and user growth agnostic of the channel, strategy, media type or platform. Growth becomes the glue that can tie the underlying channel ecosystem for a brand. Thoughts on how to bring the fundamental shift towards growth planning:

1. Shift the starting point, from channel budget to Growth Goal — From a media budget by channel to an overarching “growth goal and objective” that takes into account existing forecast, growth levers and a deep understanding of the user behavior, expectations, drivers and barriers.

Work backwards from the growth goal to breakdown the growth plans across:

• Quality Acquisition — Allocation across Paid, Owned & Earned media; Affinity, Viral Loops
• Always-On CRM for Long Term Retention & LTV — Measure user growth with retention rates D1, D14, D60; repeat purchase frequency, avg basket size
• Brand growth — Driving top of the funnel awareness & consideration, measure causality of brand growth to acquisition and retention
• New Market Launches & Internationalization
• … other initiatives

Instead of isolated plans with individual contributing KPIs, ladder all these efforts towards Annual, Quarterly, Monthly and Weekly Goals towards the North Star KPI. Focus efforts on understanding and measuring cross effort attribution, for instance the impact of brand awareness and consideration to acquisition rates; correlation between long term retention and acquisition channel. You may find higher engagement and lifetime value for users coming through organic search compared to paid search acquisition.

The channel initiatives are only levers to get to the macro growth goal. Build the ability to pull and push levers across channels and initiatives to optimize towards the macro goal.

2. Channel Obsession to User & Growth Obsession — Despite a strong intent to put the user at the center, most marketers still rally around channel tactics. The conversation is still about an “email campaign”, “social campaign”, “mobile push campaign” and so on. Channels are a means to an end. The focus needs to shift to driving growth across the brand, user base and retention; by leveraging data and insights to understand the user behavior, their expectations and barriers. Finally using the channels to engage with them in the most immersive and contextual way possible, using data and insights — this is the art and science of modern marketing.

3. From Annual Marketing Plans to Quarterly Growth Models

With the pace of disruption both internal and external to any organization, making annual plans is futile. As long as you have your budget and more importantly your macro goals defined, you should lean on more agile growth planning models. The marketing programs should be planned, optimized and adjusted at max on a quarterly basis; responding to your fluctuating growth rates. You may adjust your focus and investment from top of the funnel awareness to more tangible performance and conversion if your quality acquisition and retention rates are decelerating.

This level of growth orchestration and optimization is only possible when you align different functions within an organization on a SINGLE GROWTH GOAL which is measured, analyzed and reviewed agnostic of channel or media type or organizational silos. Build an operating model that pulls growth measures and performance across functions. While true attribution is often a bottleneck, it cannot be a show stopper.

4. Think Growth Segments, not just Attitudinal Segments

You cannot think growth without thinking data and insight. Many brands invest millions in persona creation, attitudinal segmentation but most often that analysis is not actionable. 2 most basic challenges media planners face today:

• Non Actionable Segments — Cannot translate the personas and attitudinal segments into actual users who are either viewing your ads, visiting and using your product. Ultimately, media is still targeted using high level levers like demographic, gender, age etc. Each channel ends up using a fraction of the segmentation based on the available data; losing cohesiveness across channels
• Segmentation not tied to Growth — While a lot of focus is put on understanding behaviors, attitudes, expectations, drivers and barriers; not enough emphasis is put during segmentation on lifetime value, cost of acquisition, propensity to retain and other indicators of user growth. Media planning should think about growth segments that move from deterministic to probabilistic cohorts of growth, identify high LTV users you have the right to win right away and you exactly know who they are. Gradually move outwards towards more probabilistic audiences.

5. Registration & Conversion as Success to Retention & LTV as Media Success KPI

With most media platforms especially social becoming a pure “pay for reach” play, getting in front of “a user” isn’t as much of a challenge. On top of that, giving them a free coupon or offer gets them through the door. But that’s not good enough. Media can no longer be measured through the number of impressions/eye balls, clicks and registrations. Success of media (paid, owned or earned) needs to be measured in terms of retention and lifetime value. Once you create cohorts using LTV and retention rates, your experiments and optimization should be driven by longitudinal retention, basket size, return rates etc.

7. Inverse The Funnel

Yes, there is no linear funnel from a user standpoint but there is a funnel from a priority and investment standpoint. If you re launching a new product or growing an established product-market fit, you need to identify where you put your next $100.

The funnel does not always need to flow from awareness, consideration to trial, conversion and retention. As Casey Winters, now a Growth Advisor in Residence at Greylock Partners, puts it especially for start-ups, the funnel is now inversed:

Even established products and brands should think media strategies and investment as a start-up. Don’t under estimate the power of organic; it is more work, takes more time but often higher quality and lasts longer.

8. Experimentation at Scale

The industry averages and benchmarks are often useless. The only aspect you can rely on is “experimentation”, you test and learn your audiences/segmentation, your creative, your messaging. Experimentation is the only sustainable lever in growth planning. Just buying and targeting programmatically is no longer enough, you need programmatic creative to test and learn what message works for what user at what time of day that drives higher conversion, engagement and retention.

Conclusion

At the end, I have come to realize that fragmentation within the marketing ecosystem in a digital world is only going to get worse. The diversification will happen exponentially while consolidation will be more algorithmic and slow. In that scenario, “growth obsession and planning” becomes a binder. A single growth goal that gets allocated to different parts of the machinery (organizational functions, marketing efforts, different channels — however you slide it) allows for a more coordinated, effective and efficient growth operating model.

Marketing Needs Growth Planning Not Media Planning was originally published in Growth Hackers on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There are many anomalies in the business world today. None bigger than the intent to put the customer at the center of our ecosystem or being “customer-obsessed”. While 9 out of 10 organizations would claim to do it, 9 out of 10 actually don’t end up doing it.

While the customer is at the center in the “vision”, the strategy and execution puts either the channel, product, technology or competitor at the center.

Three simple reasons:

1. First & foremost, being customer-obsessed is more difficult; it’s more work, an entirely different mindset and muscle
2. Incentivization, organizational and operating models are all based on either channel, product or the scale of technology that is built and utilized
3. The definition of success for the business does not align with the customer’s definition of success

The entire ecosystem is orchestrated with the customer on the peripheral and not at the center. No surprises why a fundamental philosophy like Customer Relationship (CRM) is managed more like a toolset or a database or an ability to send emails.

What is Customer-Obsession?

No one definition of course — An ability and mindset to invest in understanding the human behind the customer, her met and unmet needs/desires; both emotional and functional. Then using that understanding at every single opportunity to meet her unmet needs or exceeding her met needs at a time, location and context of her choice. Living in that infinite cycle where the brand needs to add value every single day, to inspire the user to stay or come one more time, and then one more time.

Jeff Bezos in one his recent letter to his employees talked about a “Day 1” company that is customer obsessed at it’s core:

“customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf. No customer ever asked Amazon to create the Prime membership program, but it sure turns out they wanted it”

It is a belief that the customer is always under warranty. When you use that belief to give the customer what she “may need” even before she knows she needs it, that is being customer obsessed.

A mindset that does NOT take loyalty for granted; loyalty in an era of instant discovery and accessibility is only as good as your last valuable experience or your first bad experience. This is only possible when you make customer the real protagonist of your story, not your brand.

The Always-On Growth Organization

I call such Day-1 companies as “always-on” growth organizations; they are constantly testing, learning, failing with an always-on mindset that centers around the customer and not the channel. I define the always-on organization that puts the customer at the center:

“.. an organization that always LISTENS to customer behavior from all channels & touchpoints;

always transforming the behavior into UNMET needs and expectations;

using the unmet EXPECTATIONS to deliver the most relevant, contextual and seamless EXPERIENCE;

at a location, touchpoint and time of the CUSTOMER’s CHOICE.”

Here are a 10 key traits of an always-on organization that enables its customer-obsessed culture (in no specific order of priority):

1. They are Data-Driven — For them, being data-driven is not about the volume, velocity and variety of data but the harmonization and application of data to deliver higher value to the customer. They don’t just use data in the rear view but use it to look ahead. They constantly apply both qualitative and quantitative analysis to “understand human behavior” that prevents their growth and then come up with the strategy to “change that human behavior” that prevents their growth. They are “always listening” to the signals originating from every single action from across the customer’s universe.
2. Focus on Understanding Expectations Before Experience & Engagement — They invest in determining the user expectations and behaviors before planning experiences that drive engagement. They realize that churn is a symptom of the eventual Experience not matching the Expectations. They understand the causality behind the problem; the “so what” behind every correlation.
3. They are OmniChannel — While they appreciate and adopt the proliferation of channels and touchpoints in the digital world, they don’t operate within the channel silos. Their experiences are behavioral driven and not isolated by channels. They engage customers with relevant, contextual experiences at a time, location and channel of her choice, not theirs (brand’s). The experiences they drive are “always seamless and frictionless”.
4. They Don’t Do Campaigns but Deliver Always-On Contextual Experiences to Build Emotional Connection with Customers– For them marketing is beyond just campaigns with a start and end date; an exciting creative idea that gets distributed through channels. Marketing is more about understanding the human context and delivering immersive, relevant content that inspires and drive human behavior. It has no start and end date; it is always-on. They converge the art and science of marketing to build an emotional connection with the customer. Read one of my posts on the 5 Cs of modern marketing
5. Agile Experimentation, Test & Learn Culture — They are “always testing and learning”; they don’t look for a perfect solution but something that is good enough to learn and iterate upon. They use customer response and behavior as the biggest focus group and not layers of proxies to make decisions.
6. Failure is Success — They don’t accept failures but celebrate them. They are “always taking risks” and “always learning from failures”. They reward failures as much as they reward success.
7. They Align Organizational Model with the Customer Journey — Their organizational and operating models are not vertically isolated by channels, product areas or just individual brands. They establish a longitudinal layer that protects the customer and her interest above and beyond the business. This layer acts like the orchestrator in a symphony while all the vertical parts of the business are specialist contributors to the ultimate outcome. They believe that customer experiences are a reflection of how you are organized.
8. Applies Systems Thinking to Build Ecosystems, Breakdown Silos — They apply systems-thinking to connect the dots at both a macro and micro level. They invest in building ecosystems and are “always breaking down silos” across data, technology, processes, planning.
9. They Have a Common Definition of Success Through the Organization that Directly Aligns with Customer’s Definition of Success — The biggest reason for a fragmented customer experience is internal misalignment between parts of the organization. This is a by-product of having different definitions of success. They establish common success KPIs that are aligned with the customer’s needs and desires.
10. Invest in Future — They are “always innovating” and investing pro-actively in predicting and delivering future needs of the customer. They don’t look for industry case studies but create new ones for others to use.

Being such an always-on organization that is customer-obsessed is extremely difficult. That’s why it’s a JOURNEY and not a sprint. It is a mindset and cultural shift for most organizations but a shift that is necessary and no longer optional.

It was always “human first”.

Posted by: Mayur Gupta on May 14, 2017.

Originally published at inspiremartech.com on May 14, 2017.

Always-On Growth Organization was originally published in Growth Hackers on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.