Complexity-wise Marketing
Agile ways of thinking and leading. Embrace uncertainty and constant change. And thrive in a digitally transformed world.
Marketing is not a vending machine.
Businesses long for marketing that works like a vending machine. Put money in, and out pops your desired revenue, guaranteed. But marketing has never worked this way, and never will.
Markets are complex systems, behaving more like the weather than predictable machines. Markets are VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous). Despite technological advancements, marketing grapples with persistent challenges: the incessant inability to showcase clear ROI, deficits in customer experience, conflicts with sales over leads, and power struggles over who’s in charge and who’s adding value.
These issues haunted marketing executives when I was a CMO and recently, as leader of the CMO Advisory practice at market research company, IDC, I encountered these conundrums in hundreds of companies – from major brands to fledgling start-ups.
Discover new management superpowers, purpose-built for complexity.
To break out of this predicament, leaders must acknowledge a mind-bending reality. Thriving in the today’s market requires adopting mindsets and work methods markedly different from those designed for the 20thCentury.
I research and write about new ways of thinking and managing that foster fluidity, insight, innovation, and agility – essential attributes for navigating marketing’s VUCA reality.
Career Lessons I’ve Learned about Earning Relevance
After a long career in marketing, I am still astonished at how many times you can communicate something to otherwise intelligent and aware people and not have it sink in. What was going on?
What Can an Antique Duck Say About Marketing’s Reality
In 1739, a mechanical duck amazed people by ingesting grain and – well, pooping. Even today, many executives still believe that complex systems can be machines – maybe not ducks, but how about marketing?
