The Challenge of Change for Marketers—Is Each Day a Brand-New Game or a Threat?

The balance of power is shifting (has shifted) to your customers. The changes most marketers are facing are unprecedented. Why do some CMOs (chief marketing officers or simply you, if you are an entrepreneur) embrace this change with the vigor of playing a brand-new game each day, while others feel threatened?

The game for Strategic Growth Champions is something I simply call, “getting closer to your clients.” When marketers play that game they always win. Marketers tend to lose the game when they unintentionally get stuck, become embedded, or stagnate for too long behind anything (good or bad)—including spending too much time focusing on things that are not meaningful and actionable, and that make a measurable difference for their clients. These are proof points.

The analytics, the exploration, the creative, the marketing organization and the realization of the vision—all of these process elements and many more—are incredible tools.

When the tools don’t work, new initiatives do not take flight on time as promised, or when any upset occurs, marketers must find new ways to discover fresh key drivers and transformative insights.

Sure, expensive studies help. Ethnographers can help, too. There are experts like me. I am here, too. I have many unique and creative methods, approaches and insights that will enliven your business and influence growth. And there's something simple I lead my advice-based clients to do. If you really want refreshing insights during a time of any marketing challenge, remember first to find fresh new ways to connect with them—your clients—regularly.

Put your customers at the heart of your business. You know this and unfortunately have heard it often enough to probably feel it is a mundane, trite and an overused statement. The secret is that understanding customers intimately will always help you deal with the changes the business world appears to throw at you.

You know your customers have the power. You as CMO have a special kind of power—the power to connect with your customers. Your customers choose to either dollar-vote your products and services every day or not. Your clients are precious resources who want to help you understand and expand your businesses to pre-eminent levels in your market. Your clients are your special guests at the daily party you are creating for them. In essence, they are the party, you are the host and everyone benefits when it all goes well.

Strategic Growth Championess comes from that special something that gives clients almost a feeling of supernatural connection and meaning in their lives, or in their product and service experiences.

The most narrow definition of success in my opinion is marketing’s role of merely expanding reach in a given consumer or b-to-b arena. Unfortunately, some CMOs only define success in terms of expanded reach. But we know we must dimensionalize our thinking on how we define success.

This requires a shift because most customers move faster than the minds and action-taking capacity of even the best marketers of today, hence causing some marketers to possibly feel threatened.

Omid Kordestani, senior vice-president of global sales and business development for Google, led a different initiative and approach. He opted not to do traditional marketing, and instead simply put out a lot of services and then raced to innovate at a rapid pace. For Omid, every day appears to be a fun game with wonderful new challenges and many rapid innovative successes.

What can you do today as a marketer to innovate for your clients, in your industry and in your market? What must you do to convert challenges associated with change in your business a fun game you can win?