Why marketing needs to be fundamentally transformed from the inside out — an org design perspective

I think it’s time for the role of marketing (and of CMOs particularly) to focus on what’s happening inside an organisation rather than on external perception only. Unfortunately though, it seems the idea of the internet ushering an era of transparency and accountability has largely passed by a lot of admen and marketing folk. I’m not saying marketing and communications aren’t still vital to a successful business, just that I don’t really think the old smokescreen strategy can really survive the times we live in. I obviously see this is a more nuanced conversation but for the sake of making my point, I’ll polarise my argument.

There a two main reasons for my opinion that I’ll cover in this post:

1. Storytelling: if brands have identities and personalities, they need to be born out of the organisation’s genuine story
2. Customer Experience: any disconnect between what is seen by customers and what is actually happening behind the scenes will sooner or later be felt by customers

Letting people tell the real story

Integrity. Communication. Respect. Excellence.

Whose values are these? You’ve probably seen similar words displayed in the foyer of most corporate companies. They are aspirational, but unfortunately, they aren’t particularly representative of what one particular organisation actually valued. The organisation is ENRON. The perpetrator of one of the biggest corporate scandals in history. And they are not alone in their espoused values being greatly at odds with their behaviours. This is the case for many brands with way bigger marketing budgets than ENRON.

Let’s look at another example. Do you recognise which brand these values belong to:

Nutrition, health & wellness. Quality assurance & product safety. Consumer communication. Human rights in our business activities. Leadership & personal responsibility.

This is almost too easy. These are the espoused values of Nestlé, the multinational conglomerate that sells sweet snacks to kids, used to pillage forests which are the home to endangered animals. It’s too easy to pick on this, so instead I’d like to abstract to the fundamental business decisions which I see as underlying this.

Tell me a joke, don’t tell me you’re funny

These brands spend a fortune on marketing. Then they spend a fortune on crisis management. This is because the disconnect between what they say they value and what their actions show they value are hugely disconnected. Instead of putting their money in building smokescreens, my suggestion is to allocate it from the inside and then moving out.

Start by investing in the way things actually are in reality. On the culture, on the people, on making the organisation a place which lives and acts according to the world it would like to create.

Brands like Patagonia and Toms have not built brands, they have built cultures and companies which tell great stories. The result of that is that they have built great brands. The job of communications then becomes to put a megaphone and a magnifying glass on the great things they are doing. Or even better, to give their happy customers a megaphone.

You don’t need to spend loads of money on pretending to be good when you are actually good and customers see that. My #1 tip to any good CMO is to be an internal campaigner and activist for the values of the organisation. To not publish anything which isn’t true, and to create internal change before communicating that message externally. Again, create a strong core, and communicate from there. I’m not sure the traditional method is sustainable in the information era.

Structures which support customers

The customer is of course the focus of any communications work. But again, telling the world you give a great customer experience will quickly become ridiculous if untrue. Here’s a good and bad example of what I mean from personal experience. I recently used these as case studies in a workshop for HEC Paris’s Exec MBA Digital Transformation students to unpick.

Case #1: Vodafone.

The brand who has built itself around ‘Power To You’. Last year, they overcharged me £1,000 for one day in the US. I called up to ask to get this fixed and the person said:

“You’ll have to go into the store in the UK to get this fixed.”

Tricky when travelling for 6 weeks. This conversation went on for months. I spoke to about 10–15 different people, mostly from different departments. I went to the store multiple times. Got no compensation. Was paid back 4 months later. With no apology. As soon as my contract is over I’ll be leaving. They know that but have done nothing to help.

Case #2: Barclays.

A delay in an international transfer cost me £2,000. I called. They called back and said:

“Mr Barnes, this was our fault and we apologise. The money will be back in your account in the coming hour.”

That simple! Carolyn in Customer Service even allowed me to interview her for 30mins about the systems which allowed her to give me such an amazing customer experience.

The difference in these two stories is in what happens below the line of visibility. That is to say, in what actually happens behind the scenes. No brand promise or slick slogan could ever help with this. Organisational Re-design is the only way. What do you think made the difference between these two cases?

Self-management for customer excellence

Empowering the frontline. The reason self-management absolutely trumps hierarchy when it comes to customer experience is because the power is placed with the person speaking directly to the customer. Carolyn from Barclays clearly demonstrated this to me on the phone, with statements like:

“I’m a decision maker”
“My manager will trust that I will get it right”
“I’m here to solve the problems that have been caused by the company”
“My department is like a family”

She explained that her process was to:

1. Look into the case
2. Form an opinion
3. Ask one person for feedback (not permission)
4. Come back to me with a proposal within 24hrs

Because she was empowered to do this, here I am, telling everybody about how great it was on the internet.

In comparison, I’m still complaining about the experience with Vodafone, where I was passed from department to department, and person to person. Barclays is a great example of what can happen when people are trusted to do what is right, and particularly when those people speaking directly to customers are the decision makers. These people are undoubtedly the source valuable insights and feedback that can help the organisation to learn and grow.

In a nutshell: invest in designing your org around the customer and in being real

Rather than investing in huge marketing budgets, I believe that organisations do best when they invest in actively designing the org around the customer and in growing a great culture and company. Then into this mix, some added investment can give happy customers those megaphones that will make marketing easier, faster, and more effective. It is no surprise that organisations like Zappos put so much of their energy around creating a self-managed organisation.

Another great example of this philosophy is Slack. I went to meet them in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago and heard a few amazing facts. Here are two of the most compelling:

They have 5x more customer support representatives than sales people

They have a “fair” billing policy where companies only pay if users actually use the product

In action: how to do this?

Part of the work we do at flux is to help organisations adopt processes, systems, and cultures which allow this shift. Here are a few top liners on approaches we like to consider, and which you could look at inside your organisation:

Create a design thinking culture
I will go into this in another post, but the basic premise of Design Thinking is that everything we do is to fulfil a human need. Making that a part of a culture and implementing processes to support that can be hugely transformative in a number of ways. This means opening up channels to create feedback loops.

Transparency & open forums
Opening up systems inside your organisation in order to force transparency can be incredibly powerful. Doing it slowly can increase accountability and force the organisation to do better and work better by its customers, which make marketing’s job way easier

Processes for continuous improvement
Toyota famously called this Kaizen. A process by which we stop and fix every bug we find so that the system is always improving. Think of this for any customer feedback. Every time a customer gives feedback, the team member who receives that feedback makes it their mission to fix that problem at a systemic level. This can huge innovation and is how Amazon ended up creating their cloud service that now powers a huge proportion of the biggest platforms in the world.

Moving towards self-management
The above requires team members to have both freedom and responsibility. The role of a CMO can be to empower people to have exactly that in order to allow colleagues to keep improving the service we bring to our customers.

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We help organisations, from startups to multi-national corporations, change & evolve towards new structures, processes, and ways of working.

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