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?

Strategic Growth Champion Identified

Strategic Growth Champions are different. They think very differently and their actions prove it. Strategic Growth Champions set a unique direction that often forges a new trend or counters one. They bring an interesting level of innovation to almost everything they do. They create initiatives that solve real big problems for others and they are never afraid to boldly share their solutions—often presenting them in the form of wildly successful products, services and high-growth companies.

I have had the very good fortune of crossing paths with many people whom I consider champions. I will share more about some of them in the coming days—and some are highlighted in my bio. Here’s one I have not met yet, but hope to very soon…

He is the “anything-but-stuffy-rich self-made billionaire” Tim Blixseth. He is rare. He understands strategic growth championess. I say that not because he grows fortunes, but because he connects with others in ways that change people’s lives.

From his early days Tim displayed a strategic ability to leverage his investments of time and money. In his first business venture at age 15 he purchased three donkeys from a classified ad in a Pacific Northwest newspaper for $25 each, then sold them as “pack mules” for $75 each. They sold immediately.

Tim’s next display of championess occurred soon after. He bought a $1,000 option for a $90,000 timber property. It was just under 400 acres. Imagine the level of courage, innovation and self-belief required for the then teenage Blixseth to stare confidently into the eyes of a realtor who threatened to keep his $1,000 if he couldn’t pay the remaining $89,000 within the week. Blixseth leveraged his bet and won. He found a timber company to buy the property for $140,000, giving him a profit of $50,000. I want to ask Tim how hard it was to secure that timber company.

He went on to buy overlooked properties and flip them to logging companies and large landowners in remote Pacific Northwest towns. He grew his business to $1 million a month, by the time her was 30 years old.

His work in recent years has focused on building Yellowstone Club. There, members can take one of the resort jets to St. Andrews for golf, followed by yachting on the high-seas and then shut off the valve with a retreat to one of Blixseth’s exclusive beach hideaways in Tamarindo. It is truly something. A strategic champion creating outstanding retreat experiences for top achievers.

Tim has accomplished it all without incurring debt and he is a very down-to-earth person. Tim carries a small plastic Staples calculator in his pocket everywhere he goes.

Tim Blixseth is highlighted in Robert Frank’s newest book Richistan, a wonderful read.