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Challenge The False Dichotomies Of Marketing

This article is more than 6 years old.

Being a marketing professor at a major business school, there are few questions from students that haven’t come up in one way or another over the years. By far the most common question I’m asked is about “B2C” (business-to-consumer) versus “B2B” (business-to-business) marketing. Typically, students assume that B2C and B2B marketing are vastly different, involving completely different approaches, frameworks and theories (and therefore what I just taught them about one type won't translate to the other). I struggle with such questions because I’ve never believed in this particular marketing dichotomy. After all, at the end of the day isn’t it just people who make buying decisions, use products and services and share their experiences with others? Yes, those people have different roles and motivations when they are making purchases for themselves versus in a professional capacity, but beyond this (and a few other fairly obvious distinctions) what’s really all that different? And given how people work, blending work time with leisure and family time, and how device-based multitasking means that they simultaneously wear their personal and professional hats, does this distinction make any sense?

In thinking about this, I realized that marketing as a discipline has a penchant for dichotomies. For the most part, I can see why we have them – they help us simplify things. But in a world with complex and fast-paced market environments and systems, does it make sense for us to always go for simplification? In fact, many of the dichotomies we have in marketing – including my pet peeve of B2C versus B2B – tend to be false dichotomies. They are false because they do not do justice to the complexity of the marketplace. They present a misleading version of the world in which things are either black or white, when in reality they are multiple shades of gray (or all the colors of the rainbow!). And, often enough, they allow for organization silos to flourish that stifle cross-functional collaboration, data sharing and, above all, performance.

Although there are probably many, here are three false dichotomies of marketing (in addition to B2C vs. B2B) that I think are most troublesome due to their oversimplification of the complexity that marketers face today.

1. Online versus offline

When was the last time that you really thought of a customer as being either “online” or “offline”? When was the last time you thought of yourself using this distinction? Clearly, the world has moved on from the days of Web 1.0 and dial-up modems, and we all are part of an omnichannel world in which digital customer touchpoints sit alongside everything else. The online versus offline dichotomy is false for this reason, and marketers are better off adopting customer-centric ways of thinking and considering all the various touchpoints that they can use to interact with customers, regardless of whether they exist in the physical or virtual worlds (or both, in the case of things like augmented reality). Know, understand and serve your customers everywhere and anywhere, and avoid thinking in online versus offline silos (or worse, running your business that way).

2. Effective versus efficient

In recent years the calls for greater accountability for marketing have not died out and, if anything, have grown stronger. Rightly so, because the onus should be on marketers to demonstrate that money spent on marketing is an investment, not merely an expense. Marketing ROI, in my view, requires marketing spending to be effective in that it generates positive performance for the business and efficient in that it does this in the leanest way possible. In other words, value-generating marketing should be about effectiveness and efficiency. Marketers cannot afford to pick one over the other, because it will result in subpar outcomes. But this false dichotomy pushes marketers to pick a side, in some sense, and that is a problem. Instead, we should strive for both. That means setting goals and KPIs that reflect both effectiveness (e.g., sales lift, increasing brand awareness) and efficiency (e.g., lowering cost per acquisition, generating word of mouth that reduces the need for higher-reach advertising). It also means resisting the temptation to focus on vanity metrics, which tend to fall on the effectiveness side but are also often quite meaningless because they aren't clearly linked to business outcomes. 

3. Creativity-driven (right brain) versus data-driven (left brain) marketing

With the surge in the availability of consumer data, coupled with advances in marketing technology and analytics, marketers seem to be talking more and more about so-called “data-driven creativity” (particularly those in some of the world’s largest advertising agencies). On the other hand, some are doubling down on a more conventional, gut-driven approach. This distinction was clear on a recent trip to New York where I met with several large global advertising agencies. They seemed to talk about being  either all about creativity or all about data. But in reality, they have to be about both. In other words, to use terminology from the marketing consultancy Kantar Vermeer, marketers need to use “whole brain thinking” and not either “left brain” (analytics, data) or “right brain” (gut, creativity). Innovative thinking in marketing always has been the exciting product of gut instinct and data. Advertising creative work, brilliant campaign ideas and successful marketing strategies have always been fueled by data in one way or another (sure, back in the good old days they didn’t have social media listening, big data analytics and machine learning – but they still had focus groups and consumer surveys). We should recognize that, and celebrate our discipline that lies at the nexus of art and science. Importantly, we need to ensure that marketers use “whole brain thinking” in order to increase their chances of success.

I'm sure there are many more false dichotomies of marketing worthy of consideration (certainly my initial brainstorming led to about another 10). And I’m sure you have some of your own in mind (your own pet peeves, so to speak); if so, please share them in the comments. Ultimately, the marketplace in which we practice marketing is a complex one and we should embrace that complexity. Instead of using pithy frameworks and false dichotomies to (over)simplify things, I urge you to look for value-creation opportunities in the complexity. By challenging the assumptions behind the dichotomies you use in your marketing organization, you may just discover some interesting (and valuable) new ways forward.

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