Sometimes it’s difficult to stay on top of all the new marketing trends. It’s easy to get lost in the constantly evolving world of tech and sometimes we do forget the fundamentals and the essence of marketing. What does truly drive customers through the funnel, and making them choose your product? The following blog post will revolve around this very interesting topic; understanding the essence of marketing. The blog post is based on some highlights from the podcast interview we recently did with Marcus Samuelsson, who's the Head of Campaign and Internationalization at Atoss. He's also an original thinker within marketing concepts and have a lot of great ideas and insights and more specifically he has some key marketing principles that he shared in the podcast. Keep reading to get insights into Marcus Samuelsson's approach on the essence of marketing and his key principles!
Jakob
Before we dive into your thoughts around the essence of marketing - can you please briefly tell us about who you are and what you do?
Marcus
Sure! I'm a marketing strategist, I come from a background of B2B IT industry. I'm working a lot with relationship marketing for the enterprise and public sector. Recently, I've gone into a little bit of a new space, as you mentioned there, I'm in the role of Head of Campaigns and Internationalization at Attos. I approach marketing with a lot of passion because I get really excited about the power of communication and the changing brain. I guess I have this personal mission for myself to try to discover the gold standard for value-based and effective marketing. That's what I'm trying to achieve in my career. This is driven by a vision that I see a world where all marketing communication is valuable to customers and effective for companies. I see them kind of go hand in hand, so, having that said, I'm happy to have this conversation with you because I see this as an opportunity to live up to my ambition — because every time I talk about this or think about this with someone, I learn and discover more. So hopefully, as I learn here, maybe I can bring someone else along for the ride and broaden someone's perspective a little bit.
Jakob
That's so interesting! I read on your LinkedIn profile before that these are the top two of your six principles you share there, and I think I agreed with so many of your thoughts. It’s really cool that you want to drive supervision of being invaluable in client communication, both for companies as well as for customers. You have thought about this, have concluded some thoughts around it, that you call the essence of marketing, and it almost became a little bit of a concept for you. So maybe you can describe a little bit what do you think is the essence of marketing, according to you?
Marcus
Sure, and let me just say before that; I would say that this is maybe not all my original ideas. I think all theory is built on older theories. This is maybe not exactly my words, but I do believe in this idea of the essence of marketing. I wanted to try to answer that question, because normally, we don't have the time to zoom out and ask ourselves these big fundamental questions. Often, we're lost in the tech suffocation of marketing. There are so many new shiny toys and TikToks - stuff that's it's so easy to get lost in, and I think if we have a clearer view on what it is that we're trying to do, fundamentally, I think it helps us keep on track and not get lost too easily. So, the question here is, what is the essence of work today?
“There are so many new shiny toys and TikToks - stuff that's it's so easy to get lost in...”.
I use the Birla model to break this down, which is this idea that there's four elements to communication and advertising. Fundamentally, there's the sender, there's the receiver, a message, a medium or a channel. Between the sender, the receiver, the message and the medium, what is the essence? I think most people would agree that the message is the essence because without the message, there is no sender, no receiver and no channel. I think that's a start, but it's not specific enough for us to start to work with. Then the real question becomes: if the essence of marketing is the message, what is the essence of the message? That is the value proposition. This is nothing crazy new or a revolutionary insight, but I think we need to be reminded of it. More importantly, we need to dig deeper into this, to understand that it's the truth on which everything else we do in marketing is built on.
Let me just put this in context, because I believe that our job as marketers, fundamentally, is attracting customers through the sales funnel. That's really all it is - from having never heard of a brand all the way through to purchase and retention. That's all we do and that's why I think the classic sales or marketing funnel is the ultimate analogy to use. The essence of marketing is the value proposition because it's the single strongest driver of pulling customers through the funnel. What we need to focus on is how to always express the right value proposition to follow, not only making sure that you have the right proposition of the claim, but equally important that you back that claim up with evidence, otherwise no one would believe you.
“The essence of marketing is the value proposition because it's the single strongest driver of pulling customers through the funnel”.
Jakob
So, how do we take this to the next step? Where do you see from your experience, companies miss the mark here? What's the problem with the value proposition? Why is it so hard to get it right?
Marcus
I think there's two parts. The first I think a lot of people have just forgotten about this or maybe they never answered that question themselves. Like I said, it's so easy to get lost. I think that fundamentally, we have a problem with doing things in the right order. I think this is important because doing things in the right order is important to get this right because you have to see this process as stacking things on top of each other, so the entirety makes sense. The challenge here, and why people struggle with it, is ensuring that you have all the way through the strategy and to the execution, a solid process. You have to start with market analysis, doing your research, laying the strategy — and then, and only then — do you start with tactics.
I can try to talk a little bit more about this in a concrete manner. If we build on what we've established already, which would be that the value proposition is ultimately what we want to get to, and then we can maybe work backwards to figure that out. So, if communicating the value proposition would be your message and you’re positioning in the market — that's what you bring to the market and hopefully what your customers received, right?
But then the question becomes to know which value proposition to message. You need to be clear on your segment targeting because not everyone will be attracted to the same value proposition, and you need to prioritize between the segments. You need to do the segmentation and the targeting, and the way you do that — this is one of the big problems — is proper segmentation. I see a lot of firmographic segmentation only: company size or industry, and that's not enough. Certainly we should not be concerned about demographic segmentation either because whether your target audience is male or female, in B2B, this has virtually no impact, and this is a trap.
So, how do we then segment? Well, the best way I think to segment your market with the end goal of communicating your value proposition and this is important.
For those who maybe aren’t familiar with the job theory, it is, in essence, a recognition that we don't really buy products or services. That's not the right mindset. We hire them to get the job done. Theodore Levitt, in 1962, the Harvard business professor, he said, “people don't want to buy a quarter inch drill: they want a quarter inch hole.” It's great because we're hiring a drill to get the job done, then putting a hole in your wall.
Once you start understanding this, everything starts to get clearer because now you can ask yourself the question, “what message is most effective?” Will it be technical specifications on the drill, what material the drill is, how long it is? Or is it the more effective message how your potential customers can help, or how they can hang a painting on their wall - because maybe that's why they want the hole in the first place. Of course, you can take this even further. You could say: I want the hole so I can hang a painting and then you could say, but why do you want a painting? Because I want a beautiful home and then you can ask why do you want a beautiful home? Because I want to feel comforted at home, or whatever it might be like: there's different levels of abstraction in the value message. Once you realize that the product or solution that you sell is just a function of it — it's just hired to get a job done — marketing gets a whole other meaning. When we focus on the jobs to be done, and the value proposition that goes with it, we create value that transcends the product. I think that's how you win at marketing.
So, just sum up this approach: you start with doing your market research, and this isn't the only part of the analysis or the research phase, right? But the fundamental part will be to develop a jobs to be done (JTBD) segmentation of the market so that you know what type of jobs your different segments are trying to achieve. Once you have those segments, you need to dress them with a population. So, how many accounts in each segment? The market value, how much did they purchase for, and the current market share.
Once you have every segment with this information, now you know which segments to target, because now you know you can categorize the segments based on profitability for you. Then once you have that, the job is to be done. Now you can develop these value propositions based on the target segments, and that's pretty much it. After that you need to set yourself objectives and targets for the year, and then you go into the tactics.
Jakob
That's a great layout of campaign structure there. That's awesome.
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Marcus
Yes, I just realized I have a great story to sum this up. I have a story about Klarna. I had a chance to listen and talk to Klarna CMO, David Sandström — brilliant guy — about the strategy and this is what they basically follow this to a T. They started with the research, analyzing the market. And what they did was the ask the market about what the most attractive product attributes in the space of online payment was. You have to remember this was back in the day when being online was a total mess. It took forever, you have to you have to pull out your credit card. It didn't feel safe. It was slow. What they found from asking the market is that the most attractive product attributes would be something that was easy and fast. It was overwhelmingly clear that the market wanted that product.
So, they developed the “smooth” concept — of course playing on easy and fast. And what they did was they built everything — their entire universe, — on one word, one message, which was their strongest value proposition. They knew that because they did the research, this is what the market wanted. So, they invested everything in it. This is an example of brilliant single mindedness. They could have said “we're fast, we're secure, we're easy”. No: they tripled down on one association to be the one and only “smooth” shopping, knowing that the value proposition of smooth shopping was the strongest market driver. That’s where their success comes from. Building a brand on this process and building it on a value proposition that really works.
Jakob
Wow, that's a great story, I haven't heard that before. So, he did his research, they understood how to position themselves against the different jobs to be done, the preferences around that. The rest is history...
Marcus
…and, of course, he executed on it. There's a lot of creativity and then the tactical execution was good as well. But it really follows through. It's a brilliant example of what I was talking about and why it's so hard. They followed through all the way from the analysis part and the research part all the way to the execution.
Jakob
I think you have put the finger on something that was sometimes put way too little effort into marketing and I think it's segmentation and understanding the different segments.
I think it's similar to the chasm with Geoffrey Moore, he has the persona model where you have applications on one layer of the matrix, the different use cases on the other one, and try to find the intersections where you have the compelling need, what are the biggest needs. We probably cross the chasm quickly in order to survive and look on demographics or firmographics and just say, “this is a good segment, let's go for that market”, and don't weigh in the needs and the preferences and the understanding of the person's needs.
Have you seen from your career, and B2B examples or campaigns that you have been involved in, where you had similar success understanding your marketer?
Marcus
Sure, I think there's a lot of examples, on different levels. But, if you talk on a campaign level, I think I had a strong experience within my previous job where the job that we were launching a new offering to a new segment. This was an IP offering towards the retail market, and what we had planned on doing was launching this offering by basically doing a physical event. We were really struggling with getting people to sign up, and I think this is something that's relatable to a lot of people - either it's pre or post pandemic, getting to the sign up for online webinars or for school - we saw some great challenges with that.
We had some generic messaging around IT and retail, but it just wasn't working. And we were failing. We had, like, a week and a half left. And we have no one, but we realized we had to do something. Fortunately, I had a research partner, a partnership with another company that helped us a lot with research, and they were able to help us to understand what their most pressing issue was, because I want to understand the job to be done because he didn't have any real previous experience at retail, from a market perspective.
What we found was this challenge of “how do you create relevant customer experiences in-store through digital innovation”? Suddenly, we knew what their challenge was. So instead of launching this event from a company perspective, we switched the messaging around to talk about digital innovation within retail. Within a week, we had booked 80 people who were fully booked out, and it wasn't only the messaging here, but it was the whole concept of the DFM. What we did was create this challenge board, because through the research, we found out that the biggest challenge here was that no-one was leading the way. There was no real way forward on how to deliver digital innovation within retail.
So given this process that we set out for the event was supported by us defining it as the single best way to deliver value. In the events venue, one side of the board was the big board where, in the mingle leading up to the event, we told our participants to just write down on a post-it note, write down their biggest challenge with digital innovation today and put it on this board. Throughout the event, we said we will try to help answer these questions, so it was an interactive event. We just got through the mingle and this board was completely full of challenges from our customers. All of a sudden, we had all these insights on what the problem was. We tried to answer some of the questions on stage but most of them were questions that we didn't have answers to yet. So, part of this concept of this event was after the event, we looked at this board and we grouped together all these challenges that were similar, and we invited the similar ones to a lunch round table. Then we sat down with all these different customers that have the same challenge and we tried to help them out. We saw some great commercial results out of this, but I think that's a great example of how, just on a campaign level, you can switch your mentality from launching a new offering to delivering the most value as possible, based on market research.
Jakob
That's so interesting - what an example. That's so cool how you could turn around an empty to sold out, in just a week or two, so that's definitely inspiring. I totally agree, you nailed the message and the challenges that were relevant for the target market when you redid the positioning - awesome!
Do you have any final words for a marketing manager who is looking for ways to improve the conversion rates and their outcomes - what do you recommend? Did you have like three thumb rules or things recommendations to start working within your ideas here?
Marcus
I do have five, maybe we'll just cover three of them we talked about these before, but I do have five principles for marketing that I believe in:
1. Transform the marketer before the marketing
The first thing is this idea that to transform your marketing, you need to transform the marketer first. So, I think this is important, you need to transform the marketer before you form the marketing. This is really important because you want to unify the language in the department. You know, everyone has to have this fundamental idea of what it is that the department is doing and what the essence of marketing is. So given that, you know, I think I have these five principles to help basically transform the department be more effective.
Principle number one is value first, and it just means always keeping the promise of value-based messaging and marketing. That must be customer centric. So always seeing it from the customer's perspective.
2. Doing things in the right order
Number two is, you know, doing things in the right order. Like we've discussed, you know, start with analysis, strategy, and then tactics, just to get an understanding of why this is so important. It is because marketing has a multiplicity to it: what I mean by that is the result of marketing is analysisX strategy X tactics. What this means for any marketer listener listening is this:it's better to do a little bit of strategy than to go all-in on tactics. Because if you if you score 100 on tactics, but zero on strategy and analysis, it doesn't matter because 100 times zero is zero. So just try to do a little bit of everything. Set the course right and follow through.
3. Focus
Number three is focus. Michael Porter has a great quote: “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.” This must be the most difficult thing for marketers to do and it’s to decide on what not to do. It sounds easy, but it's impossibly hard to get people to exclude things. They want to do everything. And like the Klarna case:they could have said, “we're fast, we're easy, we're secure”. No, they went with smooth and smooth only — so double down on that. And when it comes to more concretely focusing, don't set more than three strategic objectives here, because statistics show that effectiveness declines after three strategic objectives per year, so try to focus on three max things per year, move the needle on them, and then move on. Otherwise, you won't move the needle on anything.
4. Creativity
I'm going to move on to the fourth and fifth ones really quick. And this one, number four is just creativity because one read we've talked a lot about the strategic aspect of things today, but we can’t forget about the effectiveness of creative tactical execution. And I think one great way of ensuring high creative effectiveness in the execution is using creative briefs. So, I'm not going to go into, you know, what the brief might look like, but Google Julian Cole: he has a great creative brief to look at to make sure that you do get creative.
5. Short term and long term
My last principle for marketing effectiveness is adhering to Peter Field's and Les Binet's research on the long in the short, which says that one should do both short term sales, activation and long-term brand building, because effectiveness really comes from doing both. Build brand equity with the brand building and capitalize on what you build up by executing on sales campaigns. You need to water the tree before you can harvest the fruit. And with that said, Jakob, I'm going to stop talking. I love talking about this stuff. As you can tell, yes, I get carried away.
“You need to water the tree before you can harvest the fruit...”
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If you would like to learn more about Marcus go check out his LinkedIn Profile here. You can also listen to the full podcast session here. As referenced by Marcus in the podcast interview, here is an inspiring video by Julian Cole as well as a very useful article, about how to create a compelling value proposition which you can find here.
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