Great Marketers are Architects
A friend sent me this note yesterday:
Seth,
happy holidays to you and family
After much thought I want to go after a senior marketing
person ,Obviously you might know of someone. any thoughts? if you
do send my way . salary plus percentage of increase in biz and new biz
development.
I wrote back:
…
you need to be clear with yourself about what "senior" means and what
"marketing" means.
Do you mean a commission based salesperson who pretends to be a
marketer? Do you mean a CMO who comes from ESPN or JetBlue? Or do you
mean an advertising person?
You won’t get what you want unless you know what you want.
And his response:
Agreed . But I am sure. A strict marketer who can take the existing biz
a maximize both ends and find new revenue streams.
Of course, this isn’t going to work. It’s not going to work because "take the existing biz and maximize" is the job for a direct marketer, or an ad guy, not an architect.
What does an architect do? She reinvents the very nature of what’s delivered and how it is delivered. She reimagines the inputs and outputs of the organization, as well as its story, to create an engine of revenue that grows while benefitting all sides.
The reason we hear about google and apple and jetblue and starbucks all the time is that these are poster children for re-architecting existing business models into something very different. The marketing is not slapped on. Starbucks is not Dunkin Donuts with a clever sign. If Dunkin Donuts goes out to hire a "senior marketer" and gives that person traditional senior marketer duties, not much is going to change.
I thought of this when I saw my friend Lisa’s thriving non-profit, Dos Margaritas. The website isn’t the snappy page you’d imagine if you wanted a "senior marketer" to build you something that would spread the word and increase donations. But the business itself, what they do and the way they do it–that’s brilliant marketing architecture.