Greentarget

Pam Munoz

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Twenty-first century leaders that refuse to recognize the social needs and interests of key actors will fail to capture market share. CMOs can help CEOs understand and act on emerging opportunities honestly, openly, and strategically.

Old norms die hard.

Nowhere is that more true than in corporate America, where executives are struggling to understand and accept, let alone keep up with, the expectations and demands of a new reality: what’s good for society is good for business.

As Fortune reported recently, more than a few CEOs are now “more willing to speak out on controversial social and political issues;” some leaders at the helm of progressive brands like PayPal, Intel, and Lyft have in recent years not only taken stands on selective social issues but changed company policy to connect company values with to shifting opinions and beliefs.

Still, many leaders cannot or simply will not waver from old business norms—specifically, the expectations that government, not companies, should address and tackle social issues. Not necessarily because they’re blind to complex issues like diversity, equity and inclusion, and voting rights but because they haven’t been able to reconcile both the philosophy and logic of capitalist economics, as Milton Friedman explained it in the last century. And do so with genuine, not performative, expressions of social responsibility.

For an elevated CMO, the C-suite’s “new utility player” as we reported in the first of our series of articles on the new norms of executive leadership, this moment presents a unique opportunity to serve and support his/her/their CEO and other members of executive leadership by designing new ways of connecting the social to business in this still-uncharted reality.

And before said reality leaves present-gen leaders behind.

Words followed by deeds

Once upon a time, a CEOs’ greatest tool was the language of obfuscation. Secrecy and privacy of a company’s top leader created an aura of control and power; decisions were made almost exclusively and unilaterally on the golf course or at the dinner table

Before the digital age, a CEO had limited inputs – and a certain degree of control over – predictable outcomes. Now, information and inputs to consider in decision-making at the C-suite level are seemingly infinite.  As such, sticking one’s digital head in the digital sand on everything from climate change to voting rights, whether through avoidance, obfuscation or silence, bespeaks of indifference or ignorance (or both) at a company’s highest levels.

On the other hand, if a company assumes a hastily conceived position that smacks of the performative, then it’s “let fly the rotten tomatoes!”

But the days of lip service and “let’s not and say we did” are over; the pandemic and technology made sure of it.

Part of the challenge – a big part – is understanding how, when, why, and where to have the conversation. Rare is there alignment between what is communicated one-on-one and in confidence over an almond milk latte at the nearest coffee bar, and what is expressed publicly in the conference room in the presence of executive and senior leadership, and peers.

The same goes for external comms – maybe the most effective press release isn’t a press release at all. It’s a proclamation AND a manifestation through deeds. 

Or, said another way, its words with acts.

Whatever a company does, whatever public position it takes or doesn’t take on a social issue, it must be willing to face and accept the fact that it’s going to make some group or groups of actors unhappy. That’s actually OK, if a CEO means exactly what he/she/they declare publicly; backs it up with swift, decisive action; and is willing to explain to clients and employees the reasons for the company’s behavior.

Most rationale actors in a corporate setting can live with said unhappiness; but no one likes to be left in the dark.

Or worse, deceived.

At such moments, the CMO can step in and help the CEO connect a social position to a company’s strategy and long-term goals; and in a way that makes sense for existing and future employees. He/she/they can use data and insights through a marketing lens to inform and influence discretionary behavior of employees; motivate them through new sets of expectations, and imaginative performance goals, thereby being a friend to the CHRO, too.

Why? Any CHRO worth his/her/their salt knows that talent is an asset on the balance sheet; and companies do well when said asset trades at a higher value.

Working together, the CMO and CHRO can, for example, design incentives for brand ambassadorship for all organization talent; confronting social issues and framing them in ways that make employees believe that they’re about something bigger than the product or service; bigger than even the company itself. (Think of a famous business school case study of a hot dog company that proclaimed its mission was to head-off a protein shortage in the future.)

Even if it’s simply an invitation to be a part of a larger conversation about the issue—in fact, corporations that convoke assemblies to discuss issues openly and honestly with actors of all ilks may find themselves in the best possible position of all if there is one in such highly charged times: the convener.

Such initiatives can have a direct, positive impact on employee efficiency and effectiveness, which are absolutely critical to a company’s growth, and, as important, to raising the value of the talent asset. These assets are  welcomed, not shunned, from the table in a corporate-sanctioned forum and encouraged to discuss the most important, meaningful, and complex social challenges of our time.

Coming up next in our executive leadership series: The Virtue of Accountability

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In January, the leaders of Twitter, Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon did something that no elected representative in Congress can do to the head of our federal government. Each imposed severe, unprecedented limits on the powers of a U.S. president.

Responding much faster than Congress to the will of the people — not as voters but as consumers — the chief executives demonstrated publicly and conclusively that, when it comes to circumscribing the powers of our government’s leader, they’re more effective than members of any other branch.

The heads of Reddit, Snapchat and Shopify followed suit, banning or severely restricting the 45th president of the United States from their platforms.

“[CEOs] have money, they have power, and they have more of the public’s trust than politicians do. And they’re using all of it in an attempt to preserve America’s system of governance,” writes Felix Salmon in his article “How CEOs became the 4th branch of government.”

With this power comes, of course, great responsibility —and a new kind of regulator, more powerful than the courts or the legislatures. Consumers can use their buying power and collective social influence to keep the “fourth branch” — let’s call it the C-branch — in check.

In such a world, the CMO becomes a CEO’s most valuable, versatile ally — a critically important conduit between the C-branch and consumers. These days, they must do more, a lot more, than simply articulate positions, craft messages and disseminate information internally and externally.

The office of the CMO must also have its ear to the ground to pick up what’s on consumers’ minds — their predilections, pain points and latest causes for social and political concern — and be able to transmit all of that back to CEOs to help them make critical, high-stakes and well-informed decisions.

Like whether it’s time to deactivate a sitting president’s Twitter account.

The C-Suite’s New Utility Player

These new conditions – driven by the primacy of social and environmental concerns among present and emerging generations of consumers – have changed the game for CMOs.

The game-change has accelerated the diversification and elevation of the importance of CMOs duties and obligations that had been occurring steadily over the last 20 years. For much of that time the primary driver was technology, especially the increasing importance (and sophistication) of data analytics and AI.

Far more than just a chief marketing messenger, the CMO is now something of a CIO too — an executive who, if not working directly with information technology, must understand it well enough to take full advantage of the growing array of digital marketing tools.

Additionally, the roles of the CMO and Chief Communications Officer are becoming more integrated by the day. They must be in order to achieve what Maja Pawinska Sims calls a better alignment with “brand and corporate narrative.” As honest, relevant, human tale-telling becomes even more closely connected to the P&L, the C-suite’s storytellers are increasingly relied upon to develop new tales.

It is not incorrect, then, to refer to the CMO as the C-suite’s new utility player, the executive who must know a little bit about every other position in order to help the CEO make sense of challenges and opportunities, especially in relation to the Three Rs: Revenue, Relationship, and Reputation.

Revenue & Relationships are the CMO’s Job Too

Reputation has long been in the domain of the CMO. Marketing’s ties to revenue run deep, but the new order makes them inseparable. And relationship has traditionally resided outside the chief marketer’s purview.

Using a deep understanding of both customers and community, CMOs can and must actively identify and broker new kinds of relationships for their companies. Success will make them indispensable lieutenants, especially when it comes to helping CEOs influence “constituents” — as elected officials do.

A focus on revenue means CMOs need more than just hallway collegiality with the CFO; they need to develop an active, healthy relationship. They must also help persuade the finance chief that today, what’s good for customers and communities is good for the company’s bottom line.

Rather than be put off by such a prospect, chief marketers should view the present as an opportunity to, as Jann Schwarz writes, “reclaim a more strategic role” through a key relationship with the CFO.

“[The CMO’s] creativity and imagination (combined with commercial discipline and a customer lens) can drive a sustainable and competitive advantage” through such a rapprochement, writes Schwarz.

Clearly, this is not your mother’s or your father’s CMO.

The New Corporate Narrative: Social Responsibility

In this brave new world, the CMO is the CEO’s eyes and ears, both messenger and oracle, watching how our market-society, and the people who comprise it, are moving, shifting, aligning and re-aligning.

This means that CMOs can no longer compartmentalize company narratives, social responsibility and profitable growth. As the last Business Roundtable made eminently clear, these are now intertwined and interdependent considerations, not to mention the focus on the three Rs.

CMOs who are paying attention and playing the long game know that social responsibility is the narrative and that terms such as “social impact” and “sustainability” are something more than fleeting hashtags to be expressed merely through a sprinkling of green on the logo.

And it will remain the narrative until norms have changed so dramatically that, among successive generations of consumers, it will be one of many unspoken expectations that leaders must be, at the very least, as committed to doing no harm — socially, environmentally — as they are to generating a return on investment for shareholders.

Perhaps the CMO’s greatest value, then, will be in perceiving what is moving the market. Or more accurately who is moving it: consumers and clients who are not data points, who are not math problems, but real, live people, governed by ever-shifting social norms and fickle human nature.

And who can vote any time, from anywhere, for unelected leaders in that fourth branch of government using something that may soon be more powerful than the ballot: their credit cards.

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The past few months have seen communications professionals reaching for their crisis manuals over and over. Yet while these manuals may serve as constructive guideposts to start, their use is limited: how many playbooks, for instance, contain guidance on “abrupt, plague-induced lockdown” or “mass anti-racism movement and worldwide protests?”

Some fundamental crisis tenants, like communicating with empathy and transparency, apply in any scenario. But if these latest crises have shown us anything it’s that there’s no one way to plan for everything. Instead, the sudden lockdown and the pressure organizations felt to respond to last week’s events underscore why today’s communicators need an improvisational mindset.

Defining an improvisational mindset

To be clear, improvisation does not mean quickly coming out with vague platitudes and hollow statements expressly designed to meet the expectation for some sort of response. Nor does it mean – in this context, at least – moving ahead heedlessly, without any thought at all.  

Rather, an improvisational mindset encourages communicators to pivot fast to meet changing conditions, move the conversation forward, and back up words with action – the way a musician or comedian adapts to the scene or song at hand and acts in ways which progress it.

Frank Barrett, author of Yes to the Mess: Surprising Leadership Lessons From Jazz, summarizes the challenge well:

We live in a high-velocity world with so many cues and signals that don’t come to us with clear messages. We are always facing incomplete information, and yet we have to take action anyway. Improvisational mindset means you have to leap in and take action to say yes. If you’re just in a problem-solving mindset, your imagination is going to be shrunk. You have to have a mindset that says ‘yes’ to the possibility that something new and interesting and creative can emerge.

What’s more, we perceive improvisations as truly authentic not simply because they’re made up on the spot. But it’s precisely because the performers are so practiced and credible that they can improvise effectively.

In the corporate world, authenticity tends to stem from a company’s track record. Nike, for example, could quickly improvise an ad denouncing racism because it had “built equity with its inclusion of Colin Kaepernick in a 2018 ad campaign.” For many others, the better choice was to donate to relevant groups or outline steps to improve their own diversity.

Embracing “yes, and…”

The “yes, and” approach that drives improv is always useful, but especially in today’s increasingly unpredictable business environment. Fortunately, in the past few months we’ve seen our clients embrace this mindset. Here are a few examples.

  • Internal stakeholder coaching – We’re helping several clients coach their lawyers or consultants on how to leverage earned COVID-19 media coverage and content in client conversations and outreach. The thinking here is that the “last mile” of client outreach, which happens one-on-one, is most impactful – and now more than ever. They’ll have to be ready to think on their feet and lead with their humanity. If your organization’s professionals are unaccustomed to this type of touchpoint, an improvisational approach can help make them more effective in off-the-cuff situations.
  • Flash surveys – A few clients of ours quickly pivoted their quantitative research efforts to better understand emerging client needs and concerns. One law firm, for instance, launched a flash survey of its clients because they had been conducting a survey that felt suddenly, if temporarily, irrelevant. We moved fast to help them generate a new survey that yielded relevant results and insights. Ultimately, the flash survey findings grabbed media headlines in top tier HR trades and national business media.
  • Online focus groups – Similarly, we have several clients launching virtual focus groups as a way to obtain qualitative measures/feedback on various issues and offerings. These insights are critical in empathizing with particular audiences, and in avoiding tone-deaf positioning of products and services.
  • Agile content production – For another client, we developed a three-part podcast series about the impacts of COVID-19 on the energy industry. The process, which would typically take at least a month, was finished in about a week. Similarly, we improvised to quickly edit a survey report – originally fielded before the world was sheltering in place – so it could elucidate how the findings became even more relevant and useful in light of COVID-19.

It’s unlikely we would have conceived of these projects in typical times – but then, atypical times require atypical responses. As communicators, it’s our job to say “yes, and” to new situations and find creative ways to address them head on.

Return to COVID-19 Resources for Communicators

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The tech industry stands at a critical juncture. The consequences of the fake it till you make it culture have come home to roost, opening a yawning trust gap between companies, their customers and the society they so earnestly promised to uplift.

In this environment, enterprise tech thought leaders must take up their responsibility to contribute to a smarter conversation — by providing valuable information and intelligence to the audiences they want to influence. Of course, they’re busy building businesses, leaving it to their marketing directors to find creative new avenues to break through the noise in an information-saturated world.

In our work with clients at the growth stage and enterprise level, we’ve sniffed out a few of those paths. Here are six ways to build a holistic thought leadership program that will resonate with enterprise technology buyers.

1. Understand Your Audience by Mapping Personas and Journeys
Before developing a PR and marketing plan, it’s critical to develop a stronger understanding of your best customers, where they’re coming from and the journey that will lead them to you:

  • Interview customers and the sales team to develop what we call an audience proto persona — a brief tactical snapshot that helps you get aligned more nimbly so you can better anticipate what customers need and how to reach them efficiently in ways that matter.
  • Perform market intelligence to ensure your approach and message deliver something exceptional to the people you want to reach.
  • Develop a journey map to help you reach your customers in the awareness, consideration, nurturing and conversion stages.

2. Define and Develop a Signature POV

  • Once you gain a strong understanding of your different audiences and can prioritize them, it’s time to develop a narrative for your company through a signature point of view that explains why you’re doing what you’re doing to the people that matter.
  • Write out and share your vision, informed by the conversations you’ve had with your community of customers.
  • We like Simon Sinek’s Start With Why framework as a guide.

3. Launch and Sustain Public Relations

  • Once your customer journey and narrative are developed, your marketing team can incorporate your vision into planning and structuring milestone announcements including product launches, pivots, M&A activity and important new hires.
  • The complexity of the business drives how much is required here, so prioritize where you’re going to start before allowing the planning process to get too big. We expect and like a high degree of iteration in this process.

4. Plan and Execute Proactive Media Relations

  • Reach out to journalists whose work you, your network and your best customers like and respect; offer them meaningful interactions with your leadership team, and R&D team if appropriate. It’s important to play the long game here. You are not looking for coverage out of the gate, so much as for relationships that are useful to journalists (which in turn must be useful to their readers and, only then, to you).
  • For a client who leads an international network of startup accelerators, we invited several journalists to come check out the flagship accelerator in New York. The next day a few reporters posted pieces based on things they heard; others came back to the subject after a few weeks. But the most powerful story came from a journalist who did not return to the subject for many months and seemed for a long time like she would never write about the accelerator. She was not going to risk her very considerable credibility sharing how unique the accelerator was until she knew its ins and outs, had independently corroborated what she saw and heard, had seen the character of our client. And, most importantly, not until the story was relevant to her readers. Expecting a transactional sequence — “come see us, then write about us” — would have been shortsighted.

5. Develop a Content Strategy
One of the biggest challenges many of our tech clients face is establishing a content strategy. There are several effective ways to implement a customer-centric approach to focus your narrative and plan its execution.

  • Host a summit with key stakeholders to hash out and agree on your key messages and points of differentiation
  • Articulate a content strategy, which is really a plan for consistent storytelling and sharing ideas, and set an editorial calendar for publishing.

6. Promote Your Leaders for Executive Visibility

  • As one of our most successful founder-clients likes to say, even in big-ticket enterprise sales, people buy people, not technology.
  • Continue to refine the conversation tested through the work described above and build it out through the presence of leadership and partners so that a beneficial cycle takes root in which the thought leadership the business shares and develops through its community continues to serve as a reference in the marketplace, where it can be tested with other thought leaders.

These six steps can lay the foundation for a strong thought leadership program. If you want to differentiate your organization, your aim as a marketer is to contribute skillfully to the conversations that matter to your customers, as well as your investors. In an era of rampant noise, ideas that serve your audience and perspectives that help them comprehend and thrive in an era of unpredictability and mistrust deserve to be heard.

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A strong reputation helps a firm stand out and remain competitive. Some clients may ask us, why measure reputation when we conduct client satisfaction surveys? Aren’t they enough to measure how our reputation is faring in the marketplace? Simple answer? No, it is not. Greentarget’s annual survey of general counsel and chief marketing officers has shown time and again that recommendations from trusted sources and credentialing are important in purchasing decisions. A CMO can measure outputs (webinars, events, press releases, media coverage) until the end of time, but unless he/she understands and analyzes the outcomes of all of this hard work, the impact on firm reputation will remain cloudy. “The Top 20 Influencers of CMOs” study recently featured in Forbes revealed findings from more than 1,300 North American CMOs. It analyzed more than 680,000 tweets the CMOs published in 2016, including unique hashtags, links shared, mentions, replies and retweets. Josh Steimle, author and CMO, predicted that “companies will turn to popular business authors, speakers, podcasters and executives who have built large and engaged followings and offer them freebies to hawk everything from invoicing software to consulting services.” These are thought leaders, and most of their assets are digital, measurable and linked to reputation building. Outcomes that bolster reputation could include subscription increases to a firm’s newsletter, downloads of a firm-written survey report or introductions to new prospects (that turn into warm leads) that directly trace back to a thought leader’s PR campaign, eventually resulting in revenue. Professional and financial services businesses are unique in their ability – and we think responsibility – to contribute to a smart, productive dialogue around hot issues across sectors. These contributions result in positive reputation building. Here are three ideas to measure the impact of public relations and thought leadership programs on reputation.
  • Conduct a benchmark survey of target audiences about perceptions of a firm’s thought leadership in specific industries or sector categories in advance of a PR initiative. Survey them again 12-18 months later to see how you’ve moved their perceptions.
  • Obtain perceptions of top-tier reporters covering the space in which you’d like to be a thought leader and influencer. These reporters may provide insights you never dreamed of getting from clients of your own. These insights can be used as a benchmark or simply to inform the direction of your content for a PR campaign.
  • Identify a narrow set of competitors in the area you’d like to claim thought leadership from and conduct an audit of their content, media coverage and social media activity. Analyze and compare with your own.
Of course, professional services firms often have trouble getting distinctive thought leadership campaigns off the ground. A lack of specific business goals is a common challenge that hampers the ability to claim reputational or thought leadership territory that will most effectively help a firm compete for and win business in the face of intense competition and changing business models that require developing new strategies – particularly for law firms. Marketers should combat this challenge with specific goals and a strategic plan to execute proactive reputation-building that directly supports those goals. Kasper Ulf Nielsen, executive partner at the Reputation Institute, has said that reputation measurement, not brand measurement, is where companies should focus. He says Walt Disney, BMW and Google are among the 15 percent of businesses that understand how measuring reputation is the key to informing marketing and public relations programs that truly influence business outcomes and client service excellence. Professional services firms with true thought leadership programs will see increased influence in the industries they serve. We know it because we see it – and measure it – every day among our clients. We’re not talking about consumer-brand celebrity influence, which, while highly measurable and directly traceable to sales, is already losing its shine due to overuse. We’re talking about influence built on skilled participation in smarter conversations around critical industry issues.
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