DECISION POINT: A Call to Humanize Marketing
houston, we have a very-big-not-good-but-solveable problem.
Delivered in the spirit of Stefon from SNL Weekend Update:
If you love marketing and gaming systems for growth but don't want to deal with people ever much less those pesky customers whose actions you want to manipulate in the first place THEN HAVE I GOT THE PLACE FOR YOU.
Here’s the skinny.
We’ve been at the digital marketing game long enough to create entire organizational marketing systems - and now generations of full-term career professionals. While internal turf wars over functional ownership persist, here's where we are now:
Creative marketing creates the emotional connection.
Operational marketing establishes the connection point to capture and covert customer actions.
Growth marketing builds journeys to scale conversions.
Operational marketing, specifically, is the intersection of brand, communications, operations, sales and - commonly - direct-to-consumer commerce. It is wholly designed to the business’ priority objectives over the customer’s priority motivations behind their need.
Because we can't scale 1:1 connection (see also Kolmogorov’s Law of Large Numbers and its application to human behavior via game theory,) operational marketing engineers the environment for conversion through funnel marketing.
Rigid, controllable, linear and pre-determined, funnel marketing is a series of directed actions and automations for how, when, and where the customer engages. As yet, the funnel is the only answer to controlling the chaos of marketing at scale.
Generally speaking, operational and growth marketing are myopically focused on the following:
Capture and convert as many stakeholder actions as possible - with as little contact a possible -
to scale audience growth and revenue generation. *
This in itself is not a problem.
* To be absolutely clear - I'm a free-market capitalist as much as the next American patriot but not to the extent of Gordon Gecko. I believe growth is good. I believe money is good. I believe profit is good.
So what’s the problem?
Modern marketing systems become problematic when we expect operational and growth marketing professionals to be customer-centric - or even consider the customer experience - yet we design systems that separate them from the customer and their decision point.
To wit, when faced with the challenge of prioritizing the customer experience and decision point, I've clocked three common reactions from operational and growth marketers.
The idea of dealing with or considering the customer need inside the customer experience, not simply the customer experience itself:
1. Makes them so uncomfortable, they shut down.
2. Pisses them off so they fight it.
3. Incites blank stares because they fundamentally do not understand the question.
What is the result of separating marketing roles from the decision point?
We have collectively removed the personhood from a human-targeted business function.
Before I go on, I want to be clear that this is NOT a wholesale character assassination of operational or growth marketing and those who love it. Did anyone do anything wrong? No. Not necessarily. But no one needs to do something wrong before we decide we should do it differently, much less better and to higher returns.
This is simply an observation that in doing it so well we might maybe may have lost focus on the core stakeholder - the consumer or customer, not the company. The stakeholder can (likely) exist without the company, but the company cannot exist without the stakeholder.
As with any other massive change point, the change-makers bear the responsibility of learning and calibrating accordingly.
Why should operational & growth marketing professionals care about customer emotions?
HINT: THIS IS THE REAL MEANING of social responsibility.
a. Data does not trump our humanity.
Here's your inconvenient truth: Regardless of how much logic you toss at it, every single decision we consciously make is informed by (at the least) and driven by (at the most) our emotions. Data is information not an oracle nor a determinant.
b. Our humanity is not the antichrist of revenue growth.
At its core, marketing is a business function dependent on independent human decision making. Denying the humanity inherent to marketing is counterproductive - and costly.
Hold my beer as I dramatically oversimplify complicated behavioral economics.
We buy more, more often, when we FEAR LESS.
Playing to the CUSTOMER'S PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY and SELF AGENCY is the secret to increasing revenue. But you can't accomplish one or both without invoking the human factor.
c. Denying the humanity of our decision point is dangerous.
Industry drives social change, for better or worse. And marketing - at its best - is a powerful point of human connection. But stripping the function of its human-focus and even personhood is a slippery freakin’ slope.
Eliminating the human connection contributes directly and indirectly to the larger social ill with catastrophic implications on humanity at large - dehumanization.
Dehumanization of any kind is the bedrock of social unrest that leads to tyranny. Dictators rely on - even stoke - the micro-erosions of social vulnerability and exploit dehumanized systems, processes, and experiences. (Don't believe me? Watch this.) For anyone watching the news, this is where you connect the geopolitical dots pertaining to industrial warfare.
We might cognitively understand the connection between industry and society, but it's easier to ignore it when our ignorance is HOW we make more money.
Why is humanizing operational and growth marketing critically important now?
The rise of advanced technologies and AI that can reason forces us to this very point where we must explore the negative impacts of dehumanizing common business functions vis a vis their relationships with both humanity and technology.
Given the social influence of marketing, the future of our humanity will be greatly impacted by HOW and to WHAT EXTENT operational and growth marketing re-engineers the decision point around the human factor.
Think a-bot it, y'all.
It's not about bots vs. humans. It's about weighing the implications of a high-bottage world - and strategically humanizing systems NOW before we reach the point where playing the "human" card isn't believable because we waited too long to lean into it.
We must course-correct systems to avoid -or at least, delay - a tech-controlled future in which our willful ignorance allowed the elimination of our free will.
Otherwise, my crystal ball clearly shows our imminent reckoning:
