It has been quite a journey for me in the last 10 months since we set-up a start-up agency in the messaging app space. Like any new business, it’s been a rollercoaster on steroids with highs and lows coming daily, even hourly in some cases. Being the first to do something (in our case deciding to specialise in this area) meets with doubters, cynics and a wait and see attitude from people in the industry. I’m pleased to say that we are building momentum with soon to launch work from fantastic, enthusiastic blue chip clients.
During this time, I have learnt a lot about Australian marketers and their desire to innovate and their appetite for the new. I can also see how inadequate some marketing structures are for where market forces are taking marketing. This is not a debate about the veracity of the death of TV advertising and the importance of social media (a very big yawn). It is a much more fundamental discussion about market forces and how they are changing the way we buy products and services. Importantly it is about how some organisations are dead to the world of these market forces. Three market forces in particular are shaping our marketing destiny:
- Consumers are changing the way they communicate with each other: it takes some marketers by surprise that Australians are flocking to messaging apps. However, there are 10.5 million monthly users of messaging apps in Australia and 76% of people under 24 say it is now their primary vehicle for staying in touch with family and friends. It is the first large scale new channel in a generation, and it’s about small individual and group conversations well away from the broadcast newsfeed style of traditional social media. It’s a very different beast.
- Consumers expect that customer service, operations and marketing are talking to each other. IPSOS have a great longitudinal piece of research they have quietly done every year in Australia since 1984. It tracks the key drivers of reputation of a brand and in the last 5 years’ customer service has shot to the number one driver at 46% versus ‘quality of product and services’ at 33%. In short, brands are at the mercy of something that traditional marketing departments are not in any way responsible for.
- Everyone in marketing is closer to the transaction than ever before – digital channels and data mean sales conversion is more visible than ever before. But the levers that control that conversion are held across many hands and silos with often no real-time collaboration to drive better ROI outcomes.
Nowhere is this disconnection more evident than in the world I inhabit. The role of a brand on a messaging app is to be 1. Genuinely handy 2. Provide useful services and information 3. Transact with consumers. It’s a new world that requires more internal collaboration than ever before.
To many marketers this sounds like a lot of hard work and a lot of people in other departments to win over. The problem is that good people are trapped in the wrong structure and we need to find better ways to connect the thinking within organisations.
A possible structural model is found in ecommerce businesses where every department connects around the conversion: operations, marketing and customer service working together with common goals and a focus on evolving and experimenting in how they work.
It’s easy for me to say, much harder for an organisation to meet the challenge, but we need more ambition in this space, more connectedness between silos. Let’s go there voluntarily and with determination to do it better and awaken to the world of market forces.
By Douglas Nicol, co-founder and creative partner at The Works and founder of On Message