Jed Simpfendorfer is the Director of Strategy and a partner at T-Garage and the convener of the Melbourne Marketing Collective, making him uniquely qualified as a strategist and researcher. He also has experience as a marketer working on some of the world’s most famous consumer package goods brands at both local and global levels.
Jed attempts to answer the difficult question, “What do marketers really want?” It is a question that agencies worldwide ask. It is a question we get asked by agencies when pitching for a marketer’s business. To date, the not particularly satisfactory answer to this complex question is, it depends.
However, Jed identifies eight key aspects that most marketers are seeking and require in their roles and careers.
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Transcription:
Darren Woolley:
Hi, I’m Darren Woolley, founder and CEO of TrinityP3 Marketing Management Consultancy, and welcome to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners.
If you’re enjoying the Managing Marketing Podcast, please either like, review, or share this episode to help spread the words and wisdom from our guests each week.
What do marketers really want? It’s a question that agencies worldwide ask. It’s a question that I get asked by agencies when pitching for a marketer’s business. To date, I’ve not had a very satisfactory answer because the question is complex, and the answer is, “It depends.”
But today, I have an opportunity to delve into this question with someone who, if not uniquely qualified as a strategist and researcher, certainly has the experience as a marketer working on some of the world’s most famous consumer packaged goods brands at all local and global levels.
Please welcome to the Managing Marketing Podcast, Director of Strategy and a partner at T Garage, and the convener of the Melbourne Marketing Collective, Jed Simpfendofer.
Jed Simpfendofer:
Hi, Darren. How are you?
Darren Woolley:
Very well, Jed. Thank you for joining us.
Jed Simpfendofer:
Thanks for asking me.
Darren Woolley:
It is a big question, isn’t it? And yet, because we’re human beings, we want a very simple answer. Because it drives me crazy, an agency will say, “What’s the client really want?” I go, “I don’t know, it depends.”
You must have struggled with this yourself as a marketer and now as a strategist and researcher, right?
Jed Simpfendofer:
Yeah. So, no, it’s a really big question and one that I’ve always been really curious about. And I guess, my background’s been in marketing but also, I did a grad dip in psychology, and went back out and did some further qualifications in executive coaching, because I think working in this industry, it’s learning and development is probably a key thing that marketers want, and it’s a key thing that I want.
And I guess, you talked about, I convened the marketing collective, and that’s come about as a result of trying to understand what do marketers want and how do we help give it to each other.
So, actually, we had a connection with them a couple of weeks ago and asked this exact question: what is it that you all want? And the number one answer, which I thought was really interesting is, “We want insights from other smart marketers.”
Insights from other smart marketers
Darren Woolley:
It’s interesting, isn’t it? Because I think a lot of, particularly agency people, think that marketers are just talking to each other all the time. And yet, my experience is that often marketers can find it quite isolating, can’t they?
Jed Simpfendofer:
Yeah. I think marketers are finding it very isolating and particularly since post-COVID, and also, I’d say the senior marketing level. So, I think when I was at Mars and I was in global roles, it was fantastic. You were always talking to really smart marketers, you were traveling around, you were traveling into different countries, you were seeing different examples going on all the time.
I think sometimes when you move into a smaller organization, so I was the CMO at Carmen’s Kitchens, it was a bit harder to get that sort of stimulation, and to get those conversations going.
Darren Woolley:
It is something about the big global brands, the Nestles, the Mars, the Mondelez, the Krafts that you do have that sort of the colleagues around the world that you can share because commercially, you’re all on the same side. It must be difficult for instance, food industry — you don’t want to talk to your competitors about your challenges or issues, do you?
Jed Simpfendofer:
No, you don’t. And that’s actually something that we have said with the marketing collective that actually, we can’t guarantee that your competitors aren’t going to be in this room.
And I think also, so basically when we started the Marketing Collective, it was an opportunity, something I was talking with Miller Leith about when I was at Carmen’s, and I was really saying, “How can we get senior marketers together in the same way that you can the large organizations to share their experiences and to talk about what’s going on?”
Because what marketers really want to understand is insights from outside the industries. Even if they don’t always act on it, but give me an idea, give me a stimulation, give me something that I can think about.
For example, at the last session, we focused a lot on the conversation around attention in media and Karen Nelson-Field’s latest book on attention in media which was interesting. And I think coming from more of an FMCG background, you kind of get stuck a little bit, I think in terms of thinking about, “Okay, well, the media splintering, attention’s really hard to get through the source of channel that they’re getting, creativity’s declining, but I need to keep doing this.”
Whereas what was brought to the table from people that worked in more experiential marketing, like vicinity marketers from shopping centers or from retailers, they’ll talk a lot more about experience of marketing.
And I think the stimulation for me, the learning for me coming from that is actually we could just be getting a little bit stuck in our own routines just thinking about trying to buy media or think about media the way we have for the last 10 years.
Actually, maybe we need to get outside of that and start thinking more about creating experiences, I guess in the same way that Lego started creating experiences. So, as the media environment changes, it could actually be we need to start thinking about moving away from the current media environment.
Darren Woolley:
Well, when you think about it, those big brand engines, the Unilevers and the like, almost perfected marketing in the 20th century. And it was a time of broadcast media and paid media was very much dominant, and then you had some PR and other things.
It was always like we’ll start with media, and the creative that goes in it, and then there’s these other channels that were all … even shopper was a separate area in a lot of them, because you had the brand team, and then you had the sort of trade shopper team, and that were more with sales.
And it was definitely a great place for marketers to learn the basics of marketing or the foundation things of marketing. But in the 21st century, digital channels and fragmentation and all the things that you’re talking about of getting attention has completely, if not upended it, at least challenged a lot of the traditional thinking.
I’ll just share with you one of my bug bears, and it’s come straight out of the consumer packaged-goods FMCG, is this concept of working versus non-working. Where working is media spend and non-working is everything else.
And the number of times I’ve had interesting conversations, I go, “Okay, so where does owned media fit into that?” Is that a working media, spend or non-working? A lot of those traditions that we’ve seen come out of consumer-packaged goods really get challenged, don’t they, in this era?
Jed Simpfendofer:
Yeah, absolutely. And again, when I was in the global role, it was only about six or seven years ago that I started leading the global e-commerce portfolio team. And one of the reasons I started doing that was because I was working with the e-commerce team, connecting back into the global marketing team in terms of, this is how you need to start thinking about e-commerce and building your brand online and marketing.
Because even six or seven years ago, it was still very traditional. We’re going to make a TV ad, we might roll some elements out in digital, and we’re going to do a product innovation, and the environment’s just changed.
And when you work in those environments, to your point, you’re used to being told you need to spend 3% on non-working media and 97% on working media. And to your point, it makes it really hard to break some of the thinking in terms of, well, the media environment’s changed, how consumers consume have changed. And I think the other thing we’ve got to think about moving forward is the impact of AI.
We did a research project the other day that about 14% of Australians are now using AI to guide their business, their purchase.
Darren Woolley:
Well, their purchase, yeah. It’s becoming the new search mechanism because it’s not Google AdWords anymore, it’s like literally AI is which one should I buy?
Jed Simpfendofer:
And I think for a lot of marketers right now, we’re all wrestling with a challenge of what do I do about it? How do I adapt in this environment? And so, again, insights from other smart marketers, when you get to everyone in the room and you start talking about what have you done? How have you experienced this? How do I change?
It’s hugely transformational what you can learn, particularly when you’re dealing with a space where there may not be the academia can take you a few years to do the studies and to come on board. And I think also from an agency perspective, what you can bring to a client in terms of education, in terms of training.
One of the reasons I’ve moved from FMCG into the strategy role is because I could really see that there was a bit of a gap with a lot of marketers. Particularly, in some of the smaller companies, in terms of giving them the strategic tools and the strategic thinking and the ways to think about how you build brand plants, how you activate, how you drive growth, which I’ve learned from working in big organizations and working across different organizations.
Darren Woolley:
It’s interesting you mentioned academia and Karen Nelson-Field’s doing amazing work. But you have also got Professor Byron Sharp, we’ve got Mark Ritson out there preaching his brand style. And part of that, I feel, even though marketing science has been around for decades, I feel like it’s come into its own this century in the last 25 years because of the huge amount of data that’s now available.
And the ability, therefore, to do almost like market experiments with that data, to start modeling ways of interaction and behavior and how things work. There was attribution which has sort of fallen by the wayside because no one could quite make it work.
There is an academic bent or knowledge, but to your point before, it’s also about practical as well. And it’s getting the balance between the two because I’m not sure marketing will ever be a hundred percent a science.
Jed Simpfendofer:
Yes. No, I don’t think it’ll ever be a hundred percent a science. And also, I think there’s a … How Brands Grow is obviously a huge book, and I love Byron Sharp’s work, but it’s just one book and there’s so much-
Darren Woolley:
Or two. There’s part one and two. There’s the red and the blue.
Jed Simpfendofer:
And we’ve got the distinctive assets book and there’s new research, which are phenomenal books. But there’s such diversity in marketing and the environment. Again, some examples we got from the marketing collective the other night.
When somebody was working at FMCG in the chilled section, and they talked about having a dwell time of 29 seconds, someone else was in the beauty industry, and they were talking about having a dwell time of one and a half hours.
Darren Woolley:
Now, dwell time’s the time that a consumer will stand there looking at the range of products to make a decision.
Jed Simpfendofer:
That’s right.
Darren Woolley:
And the old fridge cabinet, you just feel guilty every time you stand there with it open because you feel like oh, the cold’s getting out.
Jed Simpfendofer:
Exactly right. We’ve got these series of books which cover, and they can provide huge insights into all those particular areas. But one of the things that really came up when we were talking to the collective was reinforcing that marketing is very much an apprenticeship game. You have to work.
Darren Woolley:
You can learn the basics doing say a degree, a marketing degree, whether it’s in commerce or a BS or a BSC or a BA, but it’s an on the job training, isn’t it?
Jed Simpfendofer:
Absolutely. And when you start thinking about … I think when I learned the most about pricing, for example, was probably when I was working with Kraft Cheese and understanding-
Darren Woolley:
Yellow fats, I think the category term is.
Jed Simpfendofer:
Yellow fats, yellow cheese. And working with the sales team who really helped me understand, “Okay, if we price point here, then when the commodity lowers this much, I can price down here, and in six months, we can delete these two SKUs from the market.”
You can’t really learn that from a textbook, you have to learn that working with good people. And I think one of the models that I’ve picked up through the time when we work through development with our team, it’s the 70-20-10 model. Are you familiar with that?
Darren Woolley:
No. Well, I’ve heard a few versions, but what’s this version?
Real World Experience
Jed Simpfendofer:
So, 70-20-10 really says 70% of what you learn is on the job. So, when you sit down and when you do your development planning, focus 70% on the job. What are the tasks? What are the activities?
20 percent’s the mentoring. For example, working with a sales team, understanding, working with somebody more senior that can help guide you, and then that 10 percent’s the academic, and I think that’s a good model.
So, in terms of, yeah, people want real world experience, the academia is hugely important. And being transformational as you said, it’s come up the marketing sciences, really come to their own and had a huge positive impact. But you need that real world experience, and you need to work with people that have been there and lived it.
And sometimes, it’s great hearing about things in practice. We talk that doing price discounts isn’t something you should be doing, it doesn’t necessarily drive penetration. When you’re sitting in front of Coles and Woolworths, there’s no option. You’re going to have to be doing price discounts, you have to live in that world.
Darren Woolley:
And then it’s learning how to balance that so that it doesn’t become an adrenaline hit that you’re constantly giving away margin, and over a period of time, actually training your customer to wait until it’s on special to buy because then you’ll never get back to … one of my favorite sayings was actually from a sales guy.
Talking about himself, he said, “As a salesperson, my job is volume and market share, and your job as the marketer is to actually drive margin. I need you to make it so I can sell it at a higher price with more margin.”
And the two of us together will make us profitable because the easiest thing in the world is to discount and get more volume, but I need to drive top line growth, and then profit comes from controlling costs, which is an operational role.
I always thought it was a really interesting dynamic because when marketers often feel like they’re being dragged into being sales responsible, but that can happen at the expense of margin and profitability.
Cross functional, practical experience
Jed Simpfendofer:
Yeah, it can. And that actually hits on a really good point as well that we’ve been talking about, is this need for cross-functional and practical experience. You need to be able to understand marketing today. You need to be able to understand finance. You need to be able to understand sales.
I started my career carrying the background for Kimberly-Clark, filling the shelves full of toilet paper, but you learn how planograms operated, and you have to start selling. You learn how the industry work, category, pricing like you need to be flowing across all those areas, which again, they’re training courses you can do, but you get that experience from on the job and working with good people.
Darren Woolley:
It’s interesting because so many marketers, particularly, really good marketers have often started off in sales.
And I think it’s because you’re starting almost at the end of the process and getting an understanding, because it doesn’t matter how good you are at building brand awareness and all those things. If it doesn’t sell, if consumers are not making that decision, whether that’s through bricks and mortar retail or e-commerce or experiences or whatever, then you’re not making that complete loop.
Human beings don’t walk around with a brain that’s segmented into, oh here’s my brand awareness and here’s my purchase decision-making process, it just exists as a continuum, and yet business often tries to split it into lots of little bits.
It makes sense what you’re saying about that cross-functional because if you’re truly going to be consumer customer-centric, you need to think or at least act like a customer and that is not segment my brain.
ROI, Influence, and Speaking the CFO’s Language
Jed Simpfendofer:
You need to be thinking about what’s that whole path to purchase? What are they seeing? When are they seeing it? How will they respond? And again, one of the conversations we often have is, what are the right objectives?
So, I think the surprise, sort of the number three thing people were talking about (I did number them) was return on investment. How do we influence spend? How do we help CFOs and GMs understand the long-term investment that’s needed in marketing?
I was surprised because you can’t have a conversation with a marketer without them saying, “This is the number one thing I need to understand, this is the number one challenge that we face in the business.”
And a lot of that does come down to, well, what are the metrics we’re going to measure? Because it’s easy to measure a sales metric, a price point, a direct activation, but it’s much harder to measure those other steps through the path to purchase and helping-
Darren Woolley:
Consideration, for instance.
Jed Simpfendofer:
Yeah, yeah. And helping the business see, if you’re building a long-term brand, you do need to understand for this particular occasion or category entry point, I need to improve my top-of-mind awareness from number three to number one. That’s the leading metric that will then lead to sales.
Darren Woolley:
There is a lot of confusion though, isn’t there, in the marketplace? Because there is so much data, there are so many things that are measured these days. And yet, in actual fact, what was it? The 95% rule that came up with B2B. At any time, there’s only 5% of the market is ready to buy in B2B. So, that means you do need longer term consideration.
It’s interesting because CFOs and CEOs that don’t have a marketing background are really existing in a very, sort of tangible measured world, whereas marketers often have to deal with the intangibles. And then I think the problem is translating the intangibles into something tangible that that finance mind can actually deal with, isn’t it?
Jed Simpfendofer:
Yeah. It’s a huge challenge. It’s probably the number one thing that gets spoken about. I often think building brands occurs over years, whereas we run a 12-month planning cycle and we need to see our ROI over 12 months.
So, you’re right. One of the big challenges, how do we educate CFOs and GMs, and how do you bring the entire organization on the journey in terms of these are the metrics we need to measure. So, with that, something like a category awareness or your distinctive asset growth.
Russel Howcroft asking this question during a conference once, he had a really good answer, which is, you’ve got to pick some sort of metric you are tracking, for example, likability of the product or preference for that particular product over others, and show the business if this increases over X period of time-
Darren Woolley:
Here’s the impact.
Jed Simpfendofer:
This is what it’s going to lead to. I think marketing mix modeling’s probably helped a little bit, but yeah, it’s very expensive to do, and there are a lot of other metrics that you can also be using, and if you can get the business on board can help demonstrate here’s what we’re growing.
Darren Woolley:
And the other thing, marketing mix modeling, you need to be careful as well. Because some of the models can just tell you what you want to hear rather than being challenged.
The number of times that I’ve seen that conversation of yeah, it’s a great model because it tells me I’m doing the right thing, but if it turns around and told you, you weren’t doing the right thing and you need to completely rethink it, would you still think it was really good?
Jed Simpfendofer:
I totally agree. That’s a really good point. And that’s one of the questions around marketing mix modeling right now. That’s a really interesting point.
Darren Woolley:
Going back to the language of CFOs, it’s interesting from my perspective, I’ve known a couple of CMOs that were economists, and they understood marketing almost from an economics point of view.
And they were very successful because what they would do, is they’d land in a new job, they’d say to the CEO and the CFO, “What are the two metrics that you want me to drive?” And then their first thing, low-hanging fruit to use a consultant’s term, would be to do an activity that actually delivered on those two metrics.
And I said, “Why?” And they said, “To get their trust.” Because if I can prove that I can actually drive the things you care about, then the next time I have this conversation, I’m going to say, “Okay, what if I can actually drive those two metrics by driving this or this metric?”
“Oh, okay. Well, let’s see how that works.” And then you get permission to do that, and that’s the way they work. It was a very structured economics approach which I’m not sure everyone could do.
Jed Simpfendofer:
That’s a great approach. No, that’s a really interesting approach, and I agree. And I think when I moved from marketing to sales, I think I came away with the saying, trade spend is my friend. Because I know that when I move into a new category, I’ve got to generate instant sales in order to keep the boss off my back, to win the trust of the sales team, to prove to the accounts that I know what I’m doing.
Meanwhile, in the background, you’ve got to be working madly. Okay, what’s my longer-term brand building initiatives? What sort of NPD can I put in the pipeline? So, it’s slightly different approach, but I agree, it’s how do you manage delivering … and it’s not just about long-term brand building in marketing either. I think some marketers can fall into that, “Well, I’m just here to do the ad,” which on paper-
Darren Woolley:
No, no, you’ve got to do the short term, the medium term, and the long term. The trouble is, if your tenure is only two to three years, you should probably be focusing on the short-term medium, but on a purely behavior reward basis.
The interesting thing I just realized in sharing that with you about the economists, both of them had gone into services industries: logistics, insurance and that type of area which doesn’t traditionally have that discipline of FMCG consumer package goods at that approach.
Having said that, there was another marketer who landed in an over-the-counter farmer business. Looked at the number of skews, looked at the marketing budget, and said, “Who’s head of sales?” They went over there, “I want to move into or share their office with them” and sat down and took all of the marketing budget and put it into trade.
Jed Simpfendofer:
Interesting.
Darren Woolley:
Because they realized there wasn’t enough investment for marketing to actually drive sales but you could absolutely drive sales by building a much closer relationship. And they said to the sales person, “Who’s our six biggest retail partners,” and then just focused on driving that.
They got voted top supplier every year for the three years that they were there, and sales just kept going up. So, the reason for sharing that is there’s lots of different ways of skinning this cat to use a terrible metaphor, but there’s lots of different ways of doing this, isn’t it?
Jed Simpfendofer:
There are. And I think that’s also going back to the cross-functional experience. I think sometimes, yeah, people think marketing’s making an ad — actually understanding the physical availability, understanding the channels you are in, understanding how you have to be on a shelf for people to pick you up in the first place.
So, really being able to understand and experience, how do I drive demand through all the, again, we used to call it the flywheel at Mars. What are those key metrics? What are the key things we need to be focusing on?
And interestingly, to your point as well, I think for a lot of organizations getting really clear, you said, we can measure a lot of things; what are the key metrics that we actually need to be measuring? Getting really clear on what they are, and being able to present those on a constant basis to the leadership team and saying, these are the metrics we’re going to measure, this is what’s going to drive our sales, this is what we’re going against.
And that could even be as simple as what sort of profit offering the trade. If we’re not offering them enough money, they’re never going to get behind what we’re doing, and that actually could be the key thing we need to fix, what we need to get behind.
Performance, Brand, and Everything In Between
Darren Woolley:
But also, retailers, you can’t forget the retailers are competing as well. And so, having suppliers (that’s their term) that help them compete in the marketplace is a big benefit as well. It’s not just about giving away margin necessarily, it’s about building mutually beneficial relationships.
People often talk about Coles and Woolworths and the domination that they have in the marketplace, but it’s interesting because ultimately, you’re playing to a game where they want to compete against each other, and so anything that can help you help them has to be a positive thing.
Advertising and marketing is very good at making up terms, and one of the things that I find are real bug bear is this idea of performance marketing. Because almost, it says if there’s performance marketing, does that mean there’s non-performing marketing?
And I like the attitude that everything you should do in marketing is performance. It just depends, to your point a minute ago, whether it’s short, medium, or long term, isn’t it?
Jed Simpfendofer:
Yes. And interesting, that’s something that came up as well that surprised me a little that marketers do see there’s a gap in, I don’t want … call it performance and non-performance marketing, but there’s a gap in understanding performance marketing for many marketers that are traditional brand builders and understanding particularly in that digital space, how do I convert to sales?
But we also see this real gap in terms of performance marketers understanding the long-term brand building. And I think James Herman’s doing a lot of presenting on that at the moment in terms of building your brand. It will actually result in building the performance marketing, the results of the performance marketing.
So, it was interesting that there was a need for marketers to say, for older marketers, how do we understand performance marketing? But also, we need the performance marketers to really understand how do I build brands? How do I grow long-term?
Darren Woolley:
See, I think the trap a lot of marketers may fall into is starting to think that all of the people that are advising them or working with them are there to help them. When in actual fact, all of these companies are businesses that are trying to make profits as well.
And it drives me crazy how what often passes as strategy is really a sales technique. In that the big social media platforms will position that … in fact, Facebook Meta’s come out and said, “Well, you only need us, our wall gardens, just give us your money. Tell us how much you want, and we’ll make it happen.”
Agencies are often pushing a particular perspective that works for them, and so the need for marketers to have really critical thinking — I’m not going to say cynical thinking because I think there’s lots of ideas but having that critical thinking of listening to all of the options and actually being able to work through because there are so many options, so many new channels, so many what techniques, so many ways of measuring things. They’re all competing ultimately for a share of budget.
New Channels, Old Challenges
Jed Simpfendofer:
Yes. And actually, a comment I heard that Bruce McCall, who used to be the global CMO for Mars, I remember one of the comments he made when he was leaving, he said, “We should spend more time teaching marketers how to read research reports and how to analyze the validity of different data.”
And I think that’s what’s interesting, again, getting together with the marketing collective, is there are all these different views, and you do need to get together and to analyze them and to talk about what’s going on and to understand the impact.
Because I think we can be guilty in this industry that there’s the next big thing which comes along. Every 12 months, there’s something new. And even with AI, that is going to change the world. Well, it will have a big impact on the world, but not necessarily in a 12-month timeframe. It takes time to adapt to it.
Darren Woolley:
And that gets you back to you don’t necessarily need to be an early adopter to get the benefits. All of the studies show that being the next one in, don’t be the first person in, sit back, just because everyone else … who are the people talking up the hype? Everyone that’s going to profit from it.
Jed Simpfendofer:
Everyone’s going to make money from it. Yeah.
Darren Woolley:
So, don’t get caught up in the hype, sit down and really work through, well, what are the tangible benefits, how and when can they be delivered? What’s the impact going to be? And I know that it becomes incredibly complex, but we live in complex times. I think we always have, they’re just more complex than before.
Jed Simpfendofer:
To your point, you need to be able to stop and critically think through. So, I find it interesting. We talk a lot, [inaudible 00:28:56] talks a lot about there’s no target marketing, it’s all about mass reach, which I sort of I agree with a lot. But then Peter Field was talking a lot about actually, if you’re going to do an activation campaign, target marketing can be quite effective.
And so, I think we also need to be able to think through some of the taglines, some of the memes that we see going round, and really understand in detail where that’s come from, and how we apply that to what we’re doing and how things will vary depending on the industry, the occasion, the market.
Darren Woolley:
Because in much the same way, the question of what marketers want or need is just marketing itself. You need to start thinking about it as there’s a toolbox, and I like the fact that a lot of these things that the group have collectively shared is about how to get a better insight into what tools to use when.
Some of that’s academic, some of it is just on the job experience. What was the third one? Academic on the job experience, and-
Jed Simpfendofer:
Apprenticeship.
Darren Woolley:
Apprenticeship. Yeah.
Jed Simpfendofer:
Yeah, working with good people.
Darren Woolley:
Learning from other people is really important. Just because something’s the hot thing at the moment doesn’t necessarily mean it’s right for you.
Jed Simpfendofer:
I mean, the influence is a phase we’ve gone through as well. One stage someone says it’s hard to turn up to a conference without having 80% of the content all being about influencers. Well, influencers have a role to play. They’re not the placebo for everything. We shouldn’t be moving all of the money into influencers, but you need to understand — nor can we ignore influencers altogether.
They’ve really changed the marketing dynamic. But it’s about stopping and talking and understanding what’s the right occasion to use an influencer, what sort of brands, what sort of business am I, and how do I scale these things over time.
Darren Woolley:
Just as a separate thought, Jed, I’m interested in whether this has come up in the collective meeting, the idea of the way marketing is seen within different organizations. Because we’ve talked about consumer-packaged goods, FMCG have one perspective from management down.
Experiential services industries often have a different idea. A lot of marketing departments end up being the promotions department or the advertising department, but it’s called marketing. Some very small businesses, I’ve heard it referred to as the coloring in department which is sort of the promotions area.
It’s interesting whether marketers are aware of the way they’re perceived or defined as their role within organizations. I’m wondering whether the title “marketing” has become such a catchall that often, you could end up in a job where you’re not really sure what your job is because it could be any of a number of things.
Jed Simpfendofer:
I think you’re right. And I also think that’s also the advantage. I’d encourage people to work across different marketing companies and different organizations to experience what it means. Because I have a very defined view in my head that it very much is the strategic center of the business.
Because I’ve worked in organizations like Mars and Kraft Heinz, where you own the consumer or you’re the voice of the consumer, you have a perspective over manufacturing and pricing and sales, and you develop the long-term strategies to make-
Darren Woolley:
Product pricing, distribution-
Jed Simpfendofer:
There we go, there we go. And I think often, another organization’s where it might be a bit smaller or they haven’t necessarily had the senior leadership, they can get relegated to just an activation type role.
And I think that’s also why working in different organizations, having a wide network, talking to different people helps you build your credibility. And I think also working with good people, certainly for myself, working with really good mentors internally and outside of an organization to help you understand how do you talk business? How do you not just talk marketing? How do you not just talk coloring in?
Darren Woolley:
Talk into the echo chamber of marketing.
Jed Simpfendofer:
And a lot of it is still about your ability to influence the business, to create a strategy. And I think also the really great marketers that I respect are marketers that have courage. Because it can take courage to challenge how business thinks, it takes courage to … you look we talked about Brent Wheelin, Telstra.
Darren Woolley:
Brent Smart.
Jed Simpfendofer:
Brent Smart. Like to lead that sort of creative direction does take courage to do. It’s easy just to follow what they’re doing. You know how Adam Ferrier has led the Thinkerbell business, he’s sort of changed how people think about agencies. He’s had the courage to do something different.
And I think often within organizations, if you’re going to be a great marketer, you have to have courage, you have to have the ability to believe what you believe, and to have analyzed the market, and to be able to stand up to the business and put your direction forward. Because if you succeed, incredible, but you can also fail and you have to be prepared to accept that.
Darren Woolley:
And be willing to do that. But I think certainly in Brent’s favor, is he has a very clear vision and a very clear way of working with his C-suite partners. Which is, he will talk and listen and challenge them to what is it that you need us to deliver?
Jed Simpfendofer:
That’s really interesting.
Darren Woolley:
And get that agreement upfront. I think the worst thing you could do is come into a leadership role within an organization, and it’s leadership of marketing but still a very important pillar within most organizations.
And not go around and ask questions and challenge and really, get first of all, a clear understanding of what the business needs, then go back to them and say, “These are the things we can do, these are the things we can’t do, or these are the things that are possible, but it would require the business to change.”
And then get agreement about, “Okay, now I’ve got a ‘mission’ that I’m going to be held accountable to, now let me get on with that job by working with you because I think your cross-functional collaboration is essential.”
Jed Simpfendofer:
A hundred percent. No, that’s a really important point. And again, that’s interesting in terms of what are the skills that marketers need, that ability to navigate internally, that ability to listen and to challenge, and to bring the empathy, and to understand how do I influence internally within a business.
And that was interesting for me when I was moved to the European world with Mars. So, I was a European Brand Director, and I was working with all of the 20 different GMs who had no authority over.
And the whole thing was how do you influence with that authority? How do you get people to follow your … you’d be on the phone the whole time with people: “I don’t want to run your ad, you don’t understand my market, my market’s different.” The whole time you are trying to listen and influence.
And I agree to reflect that point. Anytime I’ve ever gone to present a strategy to a board, to senior leadership team, that can’t be the first time they send that strategy. You have to be on the phone talking to people, listening, what’s the answer?
Because if that’s the first time they see the strategy, it’s never going to go anywhere. And obviously, you haven’t listened. It’s that ability to get alignment to your point, to listen, to understand what does success look like before you go with that direction.
Darren Woolley:
And for them to see that they’ve been heard in the way that you present the strategy. I remember really clear and great piece of advice I was given with selling creative ideas, is play back the things that were asked for. And where it was incorporated so that people almost, you got them nodding, it’s a sales technique, an old sales technique.
I’m really interested because you clearly have very strong strategic skills. The one part of strategy I think needs to be brought back is in a world where there’s an abundance of opportunity; great strategy doesn’t tell you what to do, great strategy tells you what not to do. And I think that’s also a trap that people can fall into is this sense of I need to do everything rather than I need to do a few things really well to get the results I need.
Because I see far too many times marketers trying to find a cheaper way of getting something done so that they can do more things rather than pairing away the things that they perhaps shouldn’t do or could easily drop.
And we have this process called a prioritization matrix. It’s like what are the things that are strategically and financially important. It’s a Boston Matrix, a two-by-two. Strategic importance, financial importance. If it’s not in the top quartile, both, then is it really important? Well, yeah, it could be financially important and strategic, but it’s not as important as that. And if it’s down here, shouldn’t we just find the fastest, cheapest way or not do it at all?
And it becomes an interesting approach because I think I often have had conversations with marketers that are overwhelmed with this sense of, “Look at all these things I have to do, and I’ve only got this amount of money and I’ve got no people,” and it creates almost like a panic or desperation.
Jed Simpfendofer:
Yes, yes. No, I absolutely agree. That’s a really powerful insight. And going back to what the example you gave before about the colleague from pharmaceutical who said, “You know what, I haven’t got enough money to make a real impact, I’ve got to go and put all of this in sales.”
Good strategy, I agree, is about saying what we’re not going to do, and I do agree a lot of businesses fall into that idea of we have to do everything. And even running our own business, running my own business, we’ve got to be really careful about that’s a great idea and there’s an opportunity, but this is who we stand for, this is the benefit we deliver, we’ve got to put our resources focused against these sort of areas, and we’ve got to say no to these other opportunities. I think that’s really powerful.
Darren Woolley:
You just made me reflect on my own business. The other lesson I learned is discipline. Don’t change direction just because you’re bored, change direction because your audience, your customers are bored.
Jed Simpfendofer:
Yeah, yeah.
Darren Woolley:
And even then, don’t do a massive change unless you’re going backwards. Just tweak it, make it a little bit more interesting all the time. When I got into advertising last century, people would always talk about the great English campaigns that have been going for 20 years.
Like for Guinness and Hamlet cigars, and all these terrible products when you think about it as far as health consciousness goes, but there were campaigns that got built on. They never changed direction. They never threw everything out and start again. They just constantly built that share of mind, that mental availability because there was a discipline to it.
Jed Simpfendofer:
Yes. And they resisted the urge to make a new ad every three years, and Mark Ritson talks a lot about that. The whereat is with marketers, the whereat is not with consumers-
Darren Woolley:
Or every year.
Jed Simpfendofer:
Yeah, or every year.
Darren Woolley:
Or if it’s a Facebook update every week.
Jed Simpfendofer:
Yeah, yeah, that’s right. And it can-
Darren Woolley:
Did you read Facebook are now penalizing marketers in the algorithm that put the same content up one after another?
Jed Simpfendofer:
Oh, really?
Darren Woolley:
Yeah. So, if you don’t create new content every week — now, why would you do that? Because it’s driving demand.
Jed Simpfendofer:
Yeah, absolutely.
Darren Woolley:
So, you’ve got a limited amount of resources and this demand for new content every week.
Jed Simpfendofer:
Yeah, I agree. I think that is a trap, particularly in the content. Oh, look, I’ve been guilty, but I’ve done it myself. If a product isn’t performing well, say, “Well, we’ll put something on social media.” You know it’s not going to work. You know that that amount of impact, the amount of money you’re putting behind, it’s not going to turn the sales around, but it keeps the business happy.
Here’s what we’ve done, we’re supporting it. Whereas really, if you’re being more choiceful, you’d say, “We probably need to pull away from that product and put our resources into making a bigger impact somewhere else.”
Darren Woolley:
Now, the other thing that obviously must be on marketers’ minds is their own career. Because you start off as a junior brand manager and you work your way through the hierarchy until you end up Marketing Director, and then CMO, and then suddenly, what’s next or even how do I get there in the first place? Was that something that marketers are concerned about?
Jed Simpfendofer:
Yeah. Marketers are very concerned about that. Look, that was number five on our list. I think a few things that came through … it came out a little bit with the apprenticeship as well. Like how do we make sure that we’re training the younger marketers and giving them the right skill sets, we’re putting the right development plans in place.
Interestingly, what was coming through a lot was possibly the fatigue that some of them were feeling. There’s that constant pressure of budget cuts, short cycles to your two and a half years. I mean, you kind of know what you need to be doing to build the long term brand, but you also know that you need to deliver that short term response, you know that budgets are going to get cut year on year, and you need to keep working through that cycle.
So, I think at that senior level, it was also a bit about how do we manage burnout? How do you plan your career? How do you network? And I think something that really helped me a lot was (I wish I could remember the name of the book. There’s a lot of them out there) about the need to reinvent yourself.
And I think in today’s world, we constantly need to be reinventing ourselves. Even a member of our tech team, said, “Every 18 months I’ve got to reinvent myself” because the world keeps moving and if we don’t-
Darren Woolley:
You become irrelevant.
Jed Simpfendofer:
You become irrelevant.
Darren Woolley:
And I think that’s one of the big issues with ageism. People complain about ageism. It’s because if someone’s really good at the one thing that they do, then that’s limiting. This idea of being a deep specialist, unless you can constantly reinvent and expand or move, you’ll quickly become out of date.
And there’ll be someone else comes along that’s younger, possibly more energetic and willing to work for less money that basically makes you redundant. I think experience is so valuable but it has to be in the context of constantly being relevant.
Owning Your Path: Career and Growth
Jed Simpfendofer:
It has to be relevant. I think that’s one of the things that’s surprised me as I’m getting older in my career, is that the amount of time I’ve got to spend reading, learning, developing, and why I’ve set up the Marketing Collective and join other groups like the AMI is the need to keep learning.
And I think also, building on that ageism topic, as you do get older and you do rise to more senior levels, how do you learn? You don’t necessarily have the traditional training programs from the past, you don’t necessarily have the senior leaders that have coached you in the past, I think it’s easy for some people to neglect it.
And it’s not until four or five years in people say, “Thanks, you’re not needed anymore,” that it kind of hits in. Yeah, exactly. And so, I think that’s also, again, everyone, the Marketing Collective, it is about that networking, that learning, and not just the collective, but for myself personally, and my goal is always to have one or two coffees a week with people in the industry.
Younger people, older people, because every single time you meet someone, you just learn something different. You go down a different path, there’s a different book to read, there’s a different conversation that needs to happen, and just keeping that agility going, which to be honest, it gets hard. As you get older, you get a bit worn out by it.
Darren Woolley:
One of the things that often amazes me is the number of marketers that never think about marketing themselves in their careers. In that they throw themselves into a job and it’s head down, bum up, and everything else, even life becomes an exclusion.
They just focus on doing this, and then suddenly they pop out the other end three years later, and they’re going, “Where is everyone?” And it’s so important. It’s part of, to your point, curiosity, how’s it work? What do I need to know? And also, just investing in your network.
Jed Simpfendofer:
I agree. And I think also I find it funny because we know as marketers that people pay more for branded goods than they do for private label, but very few marketers stop and think about, “What’s my brand?”
And I think, for myself, again, having worked with mentors, I’ve read books in that space, when you sit there and say, “Here’s where I’m today, here’s where I want to be tomorrow, what are the things I need to do to get me there?” That’s personal branding.
And that’s not necessarily going on LinkedIn and talking about yourself the whole time (it can be), but it’s also within the organization. What projects do I want to pick? Where do I want to work on? What skills do I want to learn?
And again, sometimes I think younger marketers expect that all training will happen on the job. I’d have to say, for most people that’ve had sustainability, 80% of what you learn happens in your time outside of the job.
So, I did one of the first e-commerce degrees in Australia back in ‘99 and I worked in e-comm consulting for a while, but then when I was at Mars, needing to reposition myself, that e-commerce degree from 15 years earlier was pretty old, so immediately I knew I had to go out attending all the different conferences.
I was in London at the time, which is fantastic. The internet advertising bureau and all these different organizations that were putting on thought leadership conferences, I just had to put a day a week to get out there and learn that, as well as picking projects with the digital teams to work on knowing that, geez, I was going to have to work half a day Sunday to make up for all this extra time. That’s what I need to do to stay relevant.
Darren Woolley:
But it’s an investment, you’re investing in staying relevant. And I think that’s really important, and probably one of the reasons for your continued success, that reinventing, that curiosity that keeps your mind fresh in a way.
And the interesting part is people do often dismiss experience. Experience is only a negative if you become locked into that’s the way the world is. But it’s incredibly valuable if you use it as a basis to build future knowledge on.
We know that all education starts from the foundation and then gets built upon, and I think that’s something that’s really important for people to remember, is that experience isn’t bad unless the person lets it lock them into a period in time.
The one thing we can’t get away from is time is always going on and on and on. And in fact, it’s even run out for us today, Jed. It’s been a great conversation. I’ve really enjoyed it. Let’s just go through the things that you found that marketers want. So, the first one was-
Jed Simpfendofer:
Insights from other smart marketers.
Darren Woolley:
Fantastic.
Jed Simpfendofer:
That real word experience, not just academics. Love academics, but you also need the real learnings and real application. Understand that ROI, speaking the CFO’s language.
Darren Woolley:
Talk business.
Leadership, Culture, and Career Sustainability
Jed Simpfendofer:
Talk business, understand what they want, and to your point, understand what they’re looking for as well as what you are looking for, that performance, branding, and sort of all that space in between. So, performance marketing versus brand building, a lot around that, thinking about career sustainability, how do you get-
Darren Woolley:
How to do this for a long time, not just a good time.
Jed Simpfendofer:
How do I keep investing?
Darren Woolley:
Do both.
Jed Simpfendofer:
Do both. Just getting that cross-functional experience, so not just in marketing.
Darren Woolley:
I think that’s so important. And because I see so many young marketers (young, I’m old now) that have done a marketing degree and they’re just ending up in this silo. I was talking to a guy who has always worked in automotive and he said, I can’t break out of automotive because everyone sees him just as a car guy, a tin man.
Jed Simpfendofer:
And that becomes quite limiting over time as well, I guess. Interesting, and then yeah, own your career.
Darren Woolley:
Fantastic. Well, that’s great conversation. Thanks very much.
Jed Simpfendofer:
Thank you, Darren.
Darren Woolley:
Jed, just one final question, and that is, if you had it all over again, what’s the one thing you’d probably do differently?
