Marketers on the edge of a nervous breakdown?

With feedback from more than 100 assignments with 65 clients, and with a front row seat to the realities and operational challenges of marketing communication and digital organizations and teams, we have decided to focus our 2019 #MarketingTrends barometer on the new realities experienced within marketing communication departments.

Entitled Marketers on the verge of a nervous breakdown? this study was conducted in France and Switzerland in partnership with Influencia and Cominmag.
Its objective is to explain what has been profoundly modified within organizations with the multiplication of channels, content, professions, uses and modes of consumption, to discuss the daily impacts of these changes at the heart of companies today, to learn from these real-life experiences, and to compare them with our consulting experiences with operational management.

Nearly 300 French and Swiss marketers, communicators and advertisers responded to the 2019 edition of the MarketingTrends barometer. We thank you warmly!

How can we not underline how digitalization has profoundly changed the way we work, communicate, consume and live. The multiplication of digital tools allowing to internalize a multitude of processes, has caused an acceleration and allowed to gain in experience.

But in practice, has efficiency really been gained? Has this overload of work, combined with a constant demand for expertise, made it possible to save money? What about the quality of the work done, the rhythm within organizations, the efficiency assisted by so many technologies and possibilities? Dispersion? Overproduction?So many questions and subjects to be reviewed in the wake of the internalization of new competencies and the definition of ever new priorities.

It is a question of finding the right measure to take full advantage of technological facilities without sinking into an orgy of associated content production..

 

With regard to our various missions focused on improving marketing, communication and digital performance, we have clearly identified three highly interdependent and interrelated sources of organizational tension: the strategic aspect, the challenges of multiplying channels/contents, and finally the organization and associated processes/tools.

Strategic component:

Convey the vision of top management to enable the most effective execution possible. Equip the strategy development, decision making and monitoring process with the right and regular level of information, combining a mix of field teams, customers, the market, and consultants.

How can we ensure the reliability of these feedbacks and points of view in today’s context of infobesity? The saturation of information leads to the degradation of the decision-making process. Research has shown that there is an optimal amount of information to gather in order to make a decision.
Beyond that, the quality of the decision-making process decreases, both from a quality point of view (rational decision in the context) and from a timing point of view (a decision that comes too late is no longer a good decision).

The second risk, and not the least, is misinformation. There is a scientific consensus on the fact that information grows with decreasing quality. However, organizations and their decision-makers cannot do without the veracity of a high level of reliable and secure information…

The third risk is a drop in productivity. The cost of interruptions in our working time due to consulting information would be equivalent to 28% of working time… From this point of view, the profusion of tools for professional use, often conceived without a vision and a systemic project adapted to the uses and badly interfaced between them, did not improve the diagnosis of the “enterprise” patient…

The fourth risk is innovation and creativity, which are nevertheless decisive. The intensive use of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) hinders our creativity because we over-stimulate our reactionary attention and atrophy our endogenous attentional capacity, necessary for reflection.

Content explosion:

Even if the digital era has greatly facilitated decision making (profusion of almost immediate data), there is no magic wand in terms of content to produce the “right” ones, those that work, increase market share, share of voice, and make it possible to achieve the objectives of each campaign in a certain way without a positioning, a strong strategic vision, all within a perennial planning of budget allocations.

This being said, without ignoring the famous “test & learn” dear to our digital marketers, and for the landscape to be as complete as possible, we must add that rare are the brands and organizations that do not saturate the channels and their spaces with content that is often poorly adapted to the targeted objectives.
We have repeatedly warned and demonstrated the true costs of customer acquisition between digital channels and traditional media.

As such, you know how important it is for us to recommend a regular and constant strategic presence on traditional media, with strong creative content built with the help of talented agencies.

Heavier and more complex marketing-communication-digital organizations and processes:

In this context of digitalization/multiplication of channels and content, associated with economic/competitive tension, the new possibility of almost “live” decision-making time has often led organizations to multiply operational bodies, sharing or even crumbling responsibilities and powers, without ensuring the positioning of clear mandates.
Add to this the frequent explosion/profusion of providers and freelancers, and you have an ideal framework to complicate, slow down and ultimately disorient organizations.
Validations, revalidations, over-validations, change of brief and choice of provider…
By collecting the simple Powerpoint presentations to push an idea internally and all the creative and execution work upstream of the decision maker, which sometimes negates the project altogether, you get an idea of the energy spent on internal seduction.
A presentation should only be used for external/client sales, we often get 50% of internal written pitch work stopped. Collaborator levels allow for a good or bad idea to be projected and all the frills muddy the waters and capture man hours.

The time devoted to sharing and coordinating meetings is exponential, and the time allocated to sharing the project becomes more important than the creation and development of the project itself.
Many organizations that we call upon prove that 75% of the time of their marketing-communication teams is absorbed by internal meetings and the adaptation of existing campaigns from one year to the next…
Meetings monopolizing more than 10 people on purely operational subjects are neither rare, nor fast, nor closely related to the importance of the issue and the subject. Consider the cost of such a meeting for the company!
Internal messaging, conference calls, videoconferences, there are many ways to mobilize and attract employees everywhere, all the time, and time is no longer a precious commodity because capturing it has become so simple.
By working on the organization, the segmentation of campaigns and the industrialization of certain processes, we manage to abolish 50% to 60% of the coordination/validation meetings. Days are lived at the rhythm of meetings, leaving no time for reflection, taking a step back, individual work, and truly strategic work with high added value.

With the digitalization of the company and the integration of new digital professions, the company is now faced with the challenge of operational agility.  The trend today is to seek simplification.
This requires a profound overhaul of organizations and collaborative models, which are almost always the primary source of savings and performance in the organizations we encounter.

 

Managers, marketers, there is no universal miracle recipe.
Vision, determination and courage are needed to provide pragmatic, common-sense solutions that support your employees in their high value-added missions to develop your market share.

Here are some ambitious mobilizing topics in perspective for 2020!