Thread by @minethatdata

1 - This quote is so darn important as it relates to marketing:

"Yeah, that looks like a good play—but you know what? I don’t know that play. When you get your own offense, you go ahead and feel free to put that in."

si.com/nfl/2018/11/12…

2 - I spent the past five years trying to get my clients to stay away from the bombardment of the "omnichannel / customer experience" thesis they kept hearing about and employing themselves and then failing miserably.

And I failed badly at the attempt.

3 - The quote explains why I failed.

I'd hear CEOs and Marketing Leaders tell me "that sounds good, but we don't execute that way ... show me a company in my industry that does it and has had success."

4 - And so I stopped trying to get people (and industry pundits / consultants / trade journalists) to realize that the omnichannel / customer experience thesis is fatally flawed. It's not worth it. They don't know my system, how could they possibly embrace it?

5 - Instead, I focus on you ... the folks who've loyally followed for nearly a decade. You believe in doing something different. You believe there is a unique way to be successful. You're all that matters.

6 - When I look for innovation in marketing/analytics, I stay far away from marketing/analytics, and for good reason. They don't know innovation outside of what the industry teaches and how the industry encourages innovation.

7 - Instead I look to sports ... the cutthroat nature of sports (win or you are fired) causes people to have to adapt/change ... and folks liberally borrow (especially in football) from each other. And it's all out there in the open, for anybody to see/copy.

8 - Example ... my team (Green Bay Packers) had bad drafts for the past four years. This left them with a depleted roster ... only winning merchandise (Aaron Rodgers, a few offensive linemen and defensive linemen) and no good new merchandise (players).

9 - In the past few years, their performance buckled as they lacked new players (new merchandise). And now that the winning players (merchandise) are aging, they've got problems.

10 - You draw the parallel to marketing/analytics. For my clients, I see comparable trends. Not enough winning/new merchandise. Third parties like Google pushing customers into old winning products (i.e Aaron Rodgers), creating more long-term challenges.

11 - The parallels are identical (sports vs marketing).

Therefore, why not look to sports for ways to cause my clients to perform better from a marketing standpoint?

12 - The biggest thing I find in the data is this - if you do a good job of harvesting new merchandise today, you increase merchandise productivity tomorrow which improves marketing productivity tomorrow which makes the marketer look good and causes the marketer to have good ROI.

13 - Therefore, the marketer must do an excellent job of promoting new merchandise today ... exposing the customer to new merchandise today ... so that the marketer gets to keep his/her job tomorrow while looking good tomorrow.

Make sense?

Questions?
KH

P.S. You might ask what I have against the omnichannel / customer experience thesis?

It's quite simple.

The thesis ignores merchandise (in sports, that would be like ignoring the players you have).

The data I analyze proves that merchandise (new & winning) is most critical.