What marketing needs more of is less, don’t you think?

While the digital revolution has transformed the art and science of marketing, it has also made marketing more complex. There is always a new technology to explore and an explosion of channels to manage. There is endless data to analyze, let alone use, and there is decades’ worth of digital disarray in marketing organisations that keeps accumulating with more channels, touchpoints, and tools. All adding up to more work for marketers.

Yet despite all this complexity, there is a small group of marketing Thrivers starting to emerge. Energised by a new purpose of serving customers’ rapidly changing motivations in this article we unpick why they’re fired-up in a burned-out workforce and how you can learn to thrive, just like them.

Thrivers know that the world will never go back to how it was. They have seized this reality and are now redefining what they do, how they do it, and the role of marketing in the business. In essence, they have used the pandemic as a forcing function to say “no more” to the way things have been.

Instead of holding on to what is, Thrivers are decluttering marketing. They are zeroing in on their customers’ new motivations and what is needed to serve them in smarter, better ways. They focus on what really matters. Discard what doesn’t. And rewire the rest. Free of meaningless stuff, Thrivers, and their teams are finding greater meaning in their work.

Decluttering marketing is paying off in a powerful trifecta.

Marketers are doing more rewarding work. Customer satisfaction and lifetime value have increased. And the business is enjoying a significant performance premium, particularly over competitors whose marketers are burned out. These are the outcomes that every business needs in order to drive growth today.

Marketing Thrivers ask themselves three simple questions:

1) Is this aligned with our purpose?

2) Is it aligned with our customers’ purpose?

3) Will it improve how we work?

If the answer to all these questions is ‘Yes’ they pursue it, and if it isn’t, they don’t. It’s that simple.

Understanding this difference is instructive for marketing organisations everywhere. By emulating Thrivers, you can begin to turn things around and focus on specific ways to improve your impact.

The Thriver difference boils down to five rules for decluttering marketing.

1) Reacquaint yourself with customers. Focus on what really matters.

Focus customers in the middle of everything by engaging with them in meaningful ways—from developing customer advisory boards to giving them a voice in product or service development. Track changing behaviors and act on customer suggestions quickly.

Discard yesterday’s personas. Humanise customer segmentation, shifting from one-dimensional caricatures to multi-dimensional views that offer a full view of customers based on what they are likely to do and why they do it.

Rewire what is measured—and how. Evolve performance measures to reflect the outcomes that are most important to customers, not just to the business. Measuring what matters to customers by using customer performance indicators (CPIs) can deliver better results on the outcomes important to the business (KPIs).

2) Find your collective difference.

Focus everyone on purpose. Strengthen cross-functional collaboration grounded in the brand purpose and a sense of community. Take ownership of a vision that the whole organization can get behind — from leadership to the most junior employees—and allow people to participate through their actions.

Discard tired ways of working. Lead the charge in the business to evolve the operating model to remove friction, support data-driven decisions and create better work environments. Ensure that the new operating model inherently transcends longstanding organisational silos.

Rewire around value delivery. Communicate the marketing strategy to internal stakeholders — particularly the C-suite — as a value story. Be specific about what every functional area of the business must do to support customers’ agenda, and do it with honesty, authenticity and transparency.

3) Move at the pace of change.

Focus on better, faster decisions. Take a hard look at processes that slow down decision-making. To get buy-in, get to the point by trading lengthy business cases for executive summaries that tell decision-makers everything they need to know so they can approve, reject or tweak the plan and move to the next thing.

Discard narrow thinking. Avoid over-indexing on one method or approach to improve organisational velocity. Take a broader view of all the components, including infrastructure, data insight, operating model, talent sourcing practices, even performance measurement.

Rewire for continuous experimentation. Create an environment where all ideas can be considered—and remember, little ideas are important and can deliver big impact. Allow for ongoing and rigorous experimentation to easily test new ideas to find those to invest in at scale—ensuring that the organisation is change-ready by design.

4) Figure out what no one wants to do.

Focus on your value and passions. Create an environment where you feel that you can share your thoughts and perspectives. Encourage others to reveal the parts of their jobs that they do not like doing as well as the tasks that inspire them where they can make the best contributions.

Discard temporary Band-Aids. Avoid the temptation to invest in tools before streamlining existing ways of working. Focus first on improving processes to better align with serving customer needs and achieving better business outcomes. Then start small to ensure solutions and refined processes will work. Expect to scale via iteration.

Rewire for human and machines. Be transparent with employees about how their roles will shift and make it easier for customers to seek out human-to-human interactions when they need them. Make it clear that there is a path to more interesting work as a way to acquire, train and retain top talent.

5) Define and own your brand purpose.

If you don’t have this, or don’t know how to create one, higher an agency that does. It’s the single most valuable business asset in your brand tool kit. Once you have your brand purpose defined, focus on employees as champions. Rally all employees across the company as the best evangelists of the brand purpose. Co-create engaging and inspiring internal communications of purpose to cultivate a shared aspiration that everyone can embody and express.

Discard the empty promises. Forget vanilla proclamations of brand purpose that could fit any brand and messages that pull at the heartstrings without any heart behind them. Ensure that the brand purpose is meaningful and specific to the organisation, not just words that sound good.

Rewire the culture to spark imagination. Foster an open and creative culture that makes room for rebels and recognize that going above and beyond has become an essential ingredient to business as usual.

Take control and declutter your marketing efforts.

By following these simple rules one step at a time and discover that shifting and getting rid of things produces greater returns. More growth. More meaning. Even more joy. This is why instead of burning out, Thrivers are igniting a rallying cry that is changing marketing.

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Rob Barton is a Design Director & Principal at Big Panda, Cayman’s leading brand consultancy.