Knowledge is power
“To help your company expand the V-Zone [the ‘value creation zone’ – where customer and company needs overlap], you must know what customers want, why they want it, and how they decide to buy,” say Thomas Barta, a former McKinsey partner, and Patrick Barwise, emeritus professor of management and marketing at London Business School.
“You must also understand what your competitors do, why they do what they do, and how they operate. And, to come up with innovative ways to market products, you need to know what those products are, why they exist, and enough about how they are being made.”
Based on research with chief marketing officers, CEOs, senior marketers and leadership experts, Barta and Barwise have outlined the 12 powers they believe all strong marketing leaders must possess. One of these is ‘falling in love with your world’ – which means understanding customers, products and the industry inside out.
According to the survey data that informed the book, this type of knowledge – of all the 12 powers – has the second highest contribution to a marketing leader’s business impact.
And while the natural focus of a marketing leader is on customers, all departments within a business must work together to create the customer experience. So marketers must not only serve the needs of the customers, but the needs of the organisation. This means that maximising the overlap between the two is where a marketing leader can truly excel. There are a number of elements involved in achieving this.
Don’t start in marketing
To acquire deeper customer, market and product knowledge, it’s important to look beyond the marketing department; gaining insight into how other departments’ work can supply immediate indicators of where the pain points of a business are, as well as help you form an internal network and gain respect from people outside your department.
Leave your desk
Make time to get away from the office to talk directly with customers. For B2B marketers, this means talking to two specific types of customer – both innovative and dissatisfied ones.
Talking to innovative customers can help you understand market trends, while talking to dissatisfied ones can help improve the customer experience – in particular by shedding light on the main reasons for dissatisfaction that can destroy customer loyalty.
B2C marketers can benefit from observing primary research, as well as listening in to call centre calls, spending time in the field with salespeople and serving customers in store.
It’s also important to use your company’s – and competitors’ – products under real-world conditions as often as possible, and to encourage family and friends to do the same, getting as much honest feedback as possible.
Ask your customers directly for help
Co-creation can be a cost-effective way of improving or developing products. This can be anything from: asking customers to come up with ad ideas or copy via a competition; inviting them to the company’s offices for an informal chat on a regular basis; or setting up an online research panel.
Turn research and analytics results into insights
The question underlying this concept is: do you have research or do you learn from research? To gauge this, it’s useful to look at three areas: is every potential source of customer insight – including, but not limited to, formal market research – being exploited? Is the data being used to develop actionable insights? Are those insights reaching key decision-makers and being acted upon?
A way to improve the usefulness of insights is to ask team members to write a one-page insight summary for each study, detailing what’s new, which insights can be used to change the business and what might be the practical implications. If a particular strand of insights becomes too similar, repetitive, or hard to use, it might be worth considering cutting the research and investing in new sources of insight.
As well as knowing the customer extremely well, it’s important to know the market inside out. This means a number of things: asking the right competitive questions – how have our markets grown over time? What are the long-term price and demand trends? What are the main competitors’ strategies? Which strategies would we deploy if we were them? And then meeting the industry by attending conferences; as well as ‘stepping back’ regularly with your team, reflecting on where you stand in the market and which competitive strategies will drive you forward.
Lastly, the research suggests that, to be a successful marketer, it’s vital to have a thorough understanding of your product. While this may seem obvious, it can be an issue for marketers who change industry. “Banks and pharmaceutical companies, for example, often recruit consumer goods marketers, and the failure rate of these hires has been high,” the book’s authors say. “Knowing how to market soft drinks doesn’t impress pharmaceutical executives enough to accept that your expertise transfers to their sector.”
This understanding can come from – among other actions – using your own products wherever possible, spending time with product development and operations teams, and swapping members between marketing and product teams. “Knowledge can be a powerful inspiration source for you as a marketing leader,” claim Barta and Barwise. “But sticking your neck out and gaining knowledge about the issues beyond pure marketing does way more for you: it can set you up for larger roles in the organisation.”
The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader: How to Succeed by Building Customer and Company Value is by Thomas Barta and Patrick Barwise and published by McGraw Hill Education.

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