Convergence of Finance and Marketing is a two-way avenue

For over a decade now, if not longer, marketers have had a desire to be line financiers -- create sophisticated mathematical models to predict marketing campaign success, make marketing decisions instantaneously with little human intervention, and to continue dehumanizing their market. The latest iteration in this effort has been the move to programmatic buying. (the "go to" word of 2013) What has been happening at the same time, however, especially with the market decline in 2007/2008 has been finance moves to be more like marketers. Late last year, while going on vacation, I decided to read the book by Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of Federal Reserve, probably the person most responsible for the irresponsible ways of the 2000's market bubble and bust. He wrote the book, "The Map and the Territory" to, pretty much, justify his tenure at Federal Reserve and to analyze why all his grandiose plans failed the economy. In the book, Mr. Greenspan concluded that the reason why he and his friends could not predict the markets, was simple -- human behavior. He delves into behavioral economics, relatively recently popularized by Chicago economics professor Steven Levitt and New York Times journalist Steven Dubner in their 'Freakanomics' blogs and books. The premise is extremely simple, everything is math, but with some human behavior. If this sounds familiar, but different to marketers, you are right. Marketing has been the polar opposite -- all human behavior, with some math. Over the past few decades, however, marketing has been moving in the realm of big data, programmatic -- attempts to 'scientize' the field and algorithmize human behavior. This, many marketers feel, would bring them into finance territory -- efficiently generate monetary valu, and more selfishly, make their services more expensive. At the same time, recent financial crises, first in the late 80's, then in the late 90's and then in 2007-2008, has taught financiers and economists that there is something to finance than just efficient markets. It is the human element that "Mad Men" have been in charge of for the past three quarters of a century. The answer lies somewhere in the middle, in understanding the linear, yet chaotic, prejudiced human behavior and logical, measured and scientific econometric approach. What we need is a Spock, a combination of human, emotional, unpredictable mother and logical, process-oriented, historically knowledgeable father. For marketing and finance fields to continue to succeed, it is not enough to refocus marketing on science, to push everything to machine learning and cold, automatic decisions; and it is not enough for economists to add some human modeling into their equations. A mind meld needs to happen between a scientific selections of facts and a human understanding of elements and decision making to humanize stock symbols and brands so that they can have a dinner table (or, rather texting/FaceTime/Skype) conversation with their human partners and contributors.

Marketing to people vs. marketing dialogue.

When marketers speak of marketing, we usually speak about marketing to our consumers, prospects or customers. We talk about which marketing channels drive particular actions that we are interested in, how we can configure our marketing processes to drive higher adoption, sales or loyalty. While this has been a great tool in an environment where media has been pushed – TV, Direct Mail, circulars, Out of Home, in the current consumer environment, this approach is wrought with issues. While a lot of marketers speak about a dialogue using social media, and other online tools, we rarely think about marketing (and marketing measurement) from consumers’ point of view. Let’s start with example. We speak about attribution. Which digital channel should get credit for a particular action and, what is the best way to optimize channels to drive a particular result. Let me flip this statement a bit on its head. Why won’t we talk about which channels consumers prefer to use to get to the particular result, and what interactions consumers do in the process. This may sound as a small change but it is a significant one. We are not looking at how to optimize channels to achieve best results, we are looking at how to optimize channels to achieve desired consumption behaviors by consumers. For instance, we are not saying we should be investing a particular amount into branded paid search, we are now evaluating whether the consumers that are consuming that paid search click, are consuming it in the flow that is particularly beneficial to us. Thus, we are not optimizing particular channel event s because they prove that they are not profitable to us, we are optimizing consumer events within their interactive journey with us to produce best possible outcome. What this means is that, while the bottom line is always important, it is our job as marketers to 1. Identify best possible consumers for a particular product 2. Identify best possible journeys (in paid, earned and owned media) for each consumer 3. Optimize consumer journeys to steer (not drive) consumers into the journeys that would generate the highest impact at the lowest cost The way that I see to do it, is to go beyond segmentation. Almost every company that I have dealt with in my marketing career, with exception of AB Inbev, and Axe, has focused on marketing to 25-45 year old women . Women in households, by and large, ARE the decision makers, so every company that wants a share of household’s share of wallet needs to speak to these women. Most companies also identified life triggers, such as marriage, birth of a baby, etc as the time that is best to market to these women, as that is when they are most likely to think about this decision. As a marketer, this sounds perfect, however, if one thinks for a moment as a consumer, do we truly have time to think about buying a computer, insurance product, make-up, when they are waking up every 3 hours to feed their baby, or are planning their wedding or enjoying the honeymoon? For us to get to this point, we need to first change our thinking, and second, change the way we are measuring and analyzing our interactions with consumers. We are currently measuring our interactions as direct connections -- our action X resulted in customer action 1. Our measurement systems need to be reconfigured to track and evaluate multiple customer interactions with us and make immediate adjustments in experience based on a change in customer behavior. We need to score our prospects and consumers on propensity to perform a particular action (conversion) that we are interested in and make tweaks to the score with every incremental interaction that the customer performs during the interactive session. We need to begin designing our measurement systems where each interaction between us and our customer immediately changes our perception of our customer and adjusts our conversation with them. Think about it as a sales process when you purchase a new car. Each consecutive action by an experienced and good salesperson is based on everything that they know about you, and while the beginning of the conversation may start with the preconceptions that the salesperson may have about you (the wife is the decision maker, you drove to the parking lot in a Lexus and are looking at a Mercedes so you are pretty well off, you are dressed all in black so you consider yourself stylish (if you live in New York City), etc.) and then they adjust as they learn more from your responses, interactions, even gestures. Our marketing measurement systems are not as advanced as a human eyes, ears and nose, but, can be, at the same time designed to pick up new actions and evaluate them against what we know, and optimize behaviors. What this process also does, is that it changes people’s work focus from focusing on developing particular products and managing particular media, to refocusing on customer behaviors. Not segments, as we usually think about it. We are not going after “young moms” or “up and coming millenials”, but at “researchers”, “deal seekers”, “cheap but gooders”, “procrastinators”, “just do it’s”. Those are behavioral segments that focus on the behaviors that we can observe, influence and guide through our controlled environment.