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Mathew Sweezey is the Director of Market Strategy at Salesforce and the author of “The Context Marketing Evolution”.
We’ve heard the warning cry countless times before: This is the end of marketing. Traditional marketing is dead. Marketing as we know it is over. As far back as 20 years ago, we were hearing it, when mass marketing had collapsed due to media fragmentation. We heard it again with the dramatic decline of print and broadcast media. And then we heard it again with the rise of social media. Yet each time marketing found a way to adapt. Budgets got shuffled around. New marketing disciplines emerged – some faded away. But fundamentally the classical marketing model never really changed much. The job of marketers stayed pretty much the same: to promote the brand using whatever mix of media made sense.
This time, however, it feels different. The global pandemic has blasted away any semblance of normality. When people do climb out of the economic shell hole, how likely is it that they’ll be ready to pick up right where they left off? Even if a vaccine is found soon, people can never be immunized against the profound disruption to their lives. Attitudes will have permanently shifted – new habits formed – old assumptions discarded. People will be ready for something different. Something more meaningful. Maybe they’ll stop thinking that what you buy is who you are – effectively, putting an end to consumerism.
Marketers have always been on the front lines of change. Which is why each leap forward, each inflection point, each seismic shift, brought a new set of existential challenges. In the past embattled marketers paused to consider the ramifications – and then figured out a way to stay relevant. The shift from analogue to digital is an early example. Another is the shift from web to mobile. And more recently the rise of streaming video has brand marketers doing pirouettes. But now, in the face of widespread social and economic paralysis, marketers truly have to think differently. Otherwise they’ll be of little use to businesses digging out from under the rubble.
The brand experience can no longer be thought of separately from the customer experience. They are one and the same. The answer to every market opportunity can no longer be an ad. Today experiences trump messaging. Which means marketing must operate with a new mandate: to lead innovation in the interest of creating value for customers.
Mathew Sweezey thinks that marketing has already died. In his new book “The Context Marketing Revolution” he says that we’ve entered a new era of what he calls “infinite media” which marketers have no chance of harnessing to suit their aims. The only way for marketers to adapt is to reenvision their role in business. Instead of finding new ways to piggyback on the constantly expanding universe of media, marketers should focus instead on helping people achieve their goals.
As head of Marketing Strategy at Salesforce, Mathew is in a unique position to ponder the future of marketing. He oversees the always much anticipated and oft-quoted Salesforce State of Marketing study. Plus, his work allows him to explore the frontier of marketing, learning from top performing organizations. He channels that learning into the talks he gives around the world. Mathew is also the author of a Marketing Automation for Dummies book which is still a top seller seven years after it was published. That’s where I began the interview, asking him to explain its perpetual popularity.
Mathew Sweezey: I really have no idea. I can take some stabs in the dark. One is technology changes radically fast. So, one of the reasons the book that I wrote still is relevant is because I didn’t write it about technology. I wrote it about a new way of thinking about what the new technology allows you to do. So, one of the hardest things for me to do with the publisher…the publisher imagined me writing this book and like, you know, “Click this button and set up this technology.” And I realized that if that was the case, then that book would be irrelevant in six months. So, rather than doing that, what I wanted to do is focus more on the theoretical aspects of how this actually changes the entire notion and idea and role of marketing. And how this is not just a new tool to apply the old methods, how you really have to think very differently about marketing, step one, and then how this then opens itself up to then a very different type of marketing. And so, that’s why that message still resonates through that book and many years later, and maybe why you don’t see some books come out because if we write a book and it’s about a technology, about how to use it, it can be pretty much irrelevant in a very short amount of time. So, maybe that’s the case. And also we see a lot of different types of books, right? You’ve got vendors coming out with different formats of books, there’s just different ones, but I guess that’s the best guess I got on that one.
Stephen Shaw: Well, we went through a process here about a year ago of searching for an enterprise solution. We looked at all of the major vendors, including Salesforce, and to say that it’s a confusing, bewildering exercise would be to understate that experience. And even for someone like myself, fairly close to it, I can’t imagine what it must feel like for the average marketer who must seem bewildered by all of the solutions out there, there are literally thousands, as you know. There seems to me, actually a need to help people cut through all of this and understand what forms that marketing stack today, what should be in it, how should they be thinking about it? What are the tradeoffs? So, is there a need for a “Marketing Automation for Dummies” version two?