Solving The People, Platform and Process Conundrum

When it comes to transformation of any sort, especially digital ones, many business and marketing leaders tend to focus mainly on the packaging, pricing, platform and sometimes people side of things.

Based on my decades of experience working in global corporates, including professional services and consultancies, I have come to observe that the dependency on the 3Ps (People, Platforms, Process) is inherent everywhere I help with transformation, including marketing and organization-wide transformation to upskill, digitalize and restructure the function to be fit for the intended vision of the organization.

However, I have also observed that many don’t fully understand the true potential and are not maximizing the true potential of the marketing function, often treating them as a communication, creative, events or worse, a corporate gifts department.

Due to this lack of understanding and appreciation of how marketing can and should work, they often try to force new technologies, new platforms or restructure the function in such a way that it leaves no room for progress, upward mobility or innovation in the way they think, plan and execute.

This in turn affects their ability to help you actualize your business value proposition to your customers as they can only do a redesigning of your product or service offerings with a nicer tagline and/or visual year after year or come up with gimmicky promotions to entice the customers.

This then affects your overall growth and profitability as you are not addressing the true needs of your customer and in turn, you look to cut the marketing budget and worse, headcount as you see them as a cost centre and not much else. Being short on resources on all fronts, your marketing team begins to churn or go back to doing the same things in trying to cope with all the business demand and the vicious cycle repeats itself.

However, often times we should be looking at transformation in totality to include process as well to check if 1) your existing process is supportive or conducive for the transformation you need to make and 2) what changes or enhancements do you need to make or 3) what new processes you need to create to incorporate the transformation needed.

Take for example, you wish to introduce automated A/B testing within your MarTech capabilities to improve on efficiency and speed to market. There are a few things you need to consider from a process perspective.

This includes:

• What is the current process your team has to go through to create content and offers to enable the A/B testing even if it’s a manual one?

• Will that process change with an automated tool or will there be an additional layer of process needed to enable the testing? This can be approval of the A/B testing logic set-up in addition to the content and offer mechanics for example.

• Are there regulatory restrictions to adhere to from a customer fairness perspective? How about the customer targeting set-up logic needed? Can you use your existing set-up framework and customer targeting attributes or do you need a new one?

• Is there any security risk in terms of data transference leakage or concerns by incorporating the new A/B testing tool onto your existing MarTech stack?

The above is just a rough example of the process and platform side of things to consider when it comes to even a simple implementation of a seemingly harmless tool. Just barely scratching the surface and not even getting into the deep end of transformation.

This is why I founded Mad About Marketing Consulting, to bridge the gap between business and marketing, having helmed transformative roles for several global MNCs, including EY, JLL, Kantar, State Street and most recently, Citibank. I work with your business and marketing teams, creative, brand, media and even business management agencies to bring across that insider perspective of how marketing can and should work as a business enabler. This is to ensure nothing falls through the cracks as you go about your organization wide transformation.

Simply said, no one understands marketing pain points and potential as well as a marketer who has been at the forefront of change, built teams from scratch and nurtured inherited and mature teams.

Check out my credentials here.

Mad About Marketing Consulting

Ally for C-Suites to work with you and your teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.