The Lost Art, Fueled by Commerce

All you have to do is find the right person in the right place at the right time, right?

One of the tenets of bank marketing is that a brand’s CMO, director of marketing, or entire division typically plays from behind. Forever, the CMO argues for a proverbial seat at the executive table.

Cornerstone’s Ron Shevlin commented on this at Linkedin, recounting a conversation with a professor at Harvard Business School. They discussed the decline of bank industry marketing and global marketing as a whole, noting:

• Marketing majors are down, with students typically seeking MBAs in investment banking or consulting. No
• The average tenure of a CMO is 18 months due to burnout or the inability to make the shift from tactical to strategic.
• Marketing is unable to tell its own story.

Each of these could merit a full discussion, but the post and its comments are completely relevant to community banking. Some piled on (“Yeah, they just don’t get it!”), others complained (“Yeah, how are we supposed to get it!”), but in reality, there’s a misunderstanding of marketing’s value. And its discipline.

In particular, marketing has a low value at banks. Commenters noted the similarity between banks and similarity between products. The industry has a lack of differentiation. Ron noted that short tenures may be a result of CEOs or entrepreneurial startup leaders not having a background in marketing. That could well be true.

Here’s a bigger problem, and it’s true in community banking:

It’s data.

As software has grown to encompass (eaten) all of our marketing, customer experience, and customer delivery processes, we CMOs have access to millions of data points. Banks in particular sit on a wealth (hee) of proprietary and walled-off data that they have little access to, and even less brain power to compute.

Bank leaders know this. And most bank leaders want to hear that they have a wealth of gold in lines of code, data, and customer habits. This may be true. Also true: Banks have little ability to stitch this data together to tell a story, and spend months, years, and millions of dollars attempting to arrive at one true data source.

The marketer, in turn, earns this job by convincing bank leaders that they can develop predictive processes, journeys, and results by leveraging a mountain of data to deliver the right message, right time, to the right customer. (If you’re a community bank, everyone assumes you can do this manually in an afternoon.) Bank leadership sees cost-savings in this approach because it’s singular in impact instead of vast; plus the data’s already there. So they’ve been told.

However, that’s not the full scope of marketing.

Sure, a CMO may be a brilliant targeted and tactician, and may know Salesforce or Google Analytics like the back of their hand. (A self-taught background in GA, WordPress, and Adobe got me pretty far inside a couple of banks.)

But targeting isn’t marketing. Ingestion of data isn’t marketing. Definitions of data governance isn’t marketing. It’s but a small part.

Marketing is art which fuels commerce. And you cannot forget the art.

What’s lost in the B-school wave of quants migrating into marketing for coding or sales friends who’ve ascended in ranks of big five firms, or startup SAAS enterprises, is that quants can only get you so far. The assumption that AI-powered Pardot campaigns and CRM queries can fuel a marketing strategy instead just gives you a low ceiling. You won’t get very far targeting one customer with the right message in one singular moment. It’s limiting, it’s time-intensive, and you’ll see that in campaign response.

A CMO is expected to straddle the line between data and creative. It’s the creatives, and the collaborators, the writers, and the facilitators who take the hybrid discipline of marketing to the next level. The most successful campaigns aren’t a success because they found the proverbial right lady on the right beach with the right relationships and right affinity to raspberry to buy a popsicle. They’re successful because their copy made millions of “right persons” think they needed a fucking popsicle.

Banking itself has no shortage of leaders ascending the ranks through finance, accounting, sales, and operations; completely unfamiliar with creative. The very idea of an Emu mascot scares them to death; let alone an Emu with Doug.

That’s the courage, vision and bold messaging that only arrives with a marketer who can produce and deliver a message, recognize the ability to scale it, and execute using a variety of the analytics at their disposal. That’s what I suspect Ron and his friend are actually noting. That’s what’s missing from our ranks today.

Give me a choice between a marketing intelligence director and a creative director, and I’ll choose the creative, each time. And I’ll win. And what you can do for your career, and your bank, is figure out how to make sure the ability to create and communicate is within your team’s control. If you’re a bank leader outside of marketing, you owe it to your leadership team to make sure you’re forever defining your brand. What do you do well? Why do people choose you? How do you communicate that to the masses? Searching for the exact right slice of account holders to apply for a HELOC is hard. Ensuring your top customers understand HELOCs in their time of need is easy. This is, in fact, the key challenge of a CMO in any industry. Your customer defines their own journey, not you. Your job is just to interpret. And deliver the art.

P.S. “Marketing is art fueled by commerce” is not my line, I borrowed it. This is attribution.

P.P.S. There’s also a perception that marketing is easy. Similar to subjective pursuits like writing, and art, this is a burden that marketing leaders learn to handle. No one has an opinion on CECL accounting standards. Everyone has an opinion on every Bud Light spot.