I was a keen rugby player in my youth. Certainly, mine was a triumph of effort over skill, but it allowed me to play at the highest level my body allowed, which got me as far as the school under-15s team.
One of my coaches along the way was ex-international player Bill Cuthbertson, who won 21 caps for Scotland, and who I really respected – but I recall not really understanding why we had to spend so much time at practice simply passing the ball in a line.
I asked Bill about his thinking once, and he pointed out that at even at the highest level, 99% of the time on the field is spent on the basics. “You’re way more likely to win,” he said, “if you minimise your mistakes 99% of the time than if you rely on a single moment of glory.”
In my conversations with CMOs lately, we get lots of questions about using all the shiny new marketing tools around these days, from the latest social media platforms to generative AI. It’s so easy to be distracted by trying to master the new stuff, and work out what role it should play in your organisation, but it can easily mean that you can end up neglecting the marketing fundamentals, which make up 99% of the game.
There’s a real art in getting the right balance between your fundamentals and your dazzling plays that end up in the highlights reel.
While marketing fundamentals are the cornerstone of every CMO role, I’ve noticed three subtle changes that the most successful CMOs have adopted.
Total drinks experience
It’s not enough to think of the role of marketing as getting the liquid on the shelves and into shoppers’ baskets. Consumers really want an entire end-to-end experience – whether that’s at-home cocktail-making or using a digital platform to integrate seamlessly with the real world.
Anheuser-Busch InBev has done this really well in recent years with its BEES platform. What could’ve essentially been little more than a smartphone version of a cash-and-carry for off-premise operators has instead been designed to help bridge the gap between product and consumer in innovative ways, both on and offline.
Launched in 2016, BEES is now used by 3.7m active users each month in 26 countries. Incredibly, AB InBev reports that in 2023, BEES drove US$40bn in gross sales, a figure up 27% on the previous year.
Trust your gut when it comes to data analysis
There was a time when marketers made their decisions based largely on solid research and instinct. Then, big data came along and at some point, the floodgates opened, leaving us drowning in a sea of data.
Unfortunately, I think a lot of it is just numbers for numbers’ sake. It’s easy to assume that just because we can measure it, then it must be important and on the flipside, just because you can’t measure it, doesn’t mean it isn’t important.
I’ve long been a firm believer in thinking with your gut. I understand that some in marketing think that’s about as rational as making a decision based on a coin toss, but recent science says otherwise, finding that humans have a ‘second brain’, located in our gastrointestinal system. The gut brain isn’t capable of thought, per se, but thanks to millions and millions of nerve endings, it can communicate with our actual brains and let us know when something doesn’t seem right.
Be agile – but know where you’re going
With several recent headlines about the short average tenure of CMOs – one report said it was little over three years – it’s little wonder that many are in a hurry to make a big impact in as short a time as possible.
The desire to make an impact fast sometimes, however, gets confused with making wholesale changes. One CMO of a large drinks brand once told me she thinks of their role as a custodian, their primary job being to take care of and protect for future generations.
At Impero, we love to work with impatient marketers. But the caveat is that the need for agility should not be confused with short-term thinking.
The modern drinks CMO is certainly changing, but let’s keep practicing marketing fundamentals. As Bill once said to me: “The game is won and lost on the training field, not in the final.”
