What happened to the marketer in marketing?

If marketing is about people, what about the people who do the marketing?

Changing human behaviours, cultural and social trends overlaid with new channels, new tech, more data and higher media consumption rates. Our online lives in particular are overloaded – the average person is exposed to around 5,000 ads per day – and our attention span is narrowing.

In this maelstrom, brands are fighting for people’s attention and marketers are being asked to do more with less time, less resource and, crucially, less budget. The question of where and how to spend to get the best return is ever more critical.

A strategist’s job is to make sense of the world but the question we should now ask ourselves is 'whose world?'

In any good agency, there will be strategists ready to get their hands dirty and dig into the complexity of their client’s brand and its commercial, audience and contextual relationships.

In particular, the strategist needs to be the voice of the consumer and what makes them tick. Their job is to focus energy on how a brand can create behaviour change by getting under the skin of human beings; trying to find new and distinctive ways to connect, persuade and, ultimately, sell.

However, the focus from agencies is still too often about ‘how much have you got for our ideas’, rather than ‘what do you really need to help you grow, and how is it realistically possible within the context of your business?’.

What about what makes marketers tick?

The agency relationship is just one portion of what the marketer needs to manage versus the total focus on the relationship from the agency-side. This means that often the agency can be perceived to add pressure or time to the process of delivering marketing.

How often do we hear the same frustrations from marketers?

• They can’t buy the whole strategy because it doesn’t account for operational realities
• They know what they should be doing, thanks very much, but don’t have the budget or resource
• They don’t feel included in the process
• They don’t feel listened to (clients are, after all, the expert in their brand and their consumers)

Good strategists will, of course, be able to empathise with their client audience and sell ideas in a way that stakeholders can buy, but that’s not the same as explicitly aiming to make the marketer’s life easier. Now, more than ever before, it’s time to listen more deeply and carefully to what they are telling us.

Putting the marketer back into marketing

At Indicia Worldwide, we’re focused on finding ways to relieve the pressures of marketers or at least not adding to them.

We pride ourselves on client relationships that last decades with clients like Unilever and The Very Group, and have taken time to listen and build our understanding of how their businesses operate. Consequently, we are able to create strategy that leads to better, more effective ideas while balancing feasibility of delivery for marketers.

We’re committed to applying strategic thinking to understanding the client-side marketer’s world more deeply, listening to their motivations, drivers and barriers and resisting the industry’s temptation to tell rather than show.

If we open our eyes and minds to their reality we can deliver more ingenious, co-created and smart solutions for everyone’s collective benefit.