Agency, Growth, & Experience

I’ve been busy and therefore inconsistent in writing. I don’t know how these other fuckers make it look so easy to publish content frequently!

But I was inspired and have been meaning to write this post since I first kicked things off with Marketing Clarity. This one is all about the purpose of marketing. Here’s how it’ll breakdown.

• The 3 functions of marketing

• Career/title examples within each

• A killer example of each

Soon after I joined Uber they put in place a new CMO - their first one ever. I had the chance to work with her on a few projects directly and it was clear to me that she wasn’t used to a tech and operation driven company like Uber but that she had great experience building brands at a global level.

Six months after she was hired, she was let go.

She was replaced by someone who had led comms efforts at Uber since the early days and knew the business deeply. Can you imagine, for all the toes that Uber stepped on during its rise, being the person who navigated their public relations? This new leader overseeing marketing was real sharp and decisive but she wasn’t a marketer.

In fact, soon after she took the position she reached out to individual marketing team leads (Uber had quite a few, I led Bikes & Scooter marketing) and she asked us all to answer a single question…

“What does your team do?”

Fucking hell. What a question huh? Imagine, you get a new boss, you haven’t had a chance to get to know each other, and now it feels like you’re on the firing line while being asked to describe your very purpose. There would be no meeting, no slide deck, no images or charts or anything else. Simply write it down in a document and send it over. I submitted my answer. No response.

Fast forward two very long and silent months and I, my team of nearly 40, and 400 other people in other marketing departments, were all let go. (Yes, over a zoom - stop whining about how you get laid off.)

To this day, I never lose sleep over getting laid off but dammit I just want to know what she thought of my response! I need some fucking closure!

Anyways - I can’t share my exact response but I remember the structure and it’s one that I’ve stuck with to this day. So, here’s my answer to, “what does your (marketing) team do?”

The 3 functions of marketing. This was the core of my response.

Marketing is the single department with the most diverse set of functions within it. Marketing’s role within a company is multi-faceted. Sometimes qualitative, sometimes quantitative. Sometimes supportive, sometimes running independently of any other team or other initiatives.

Agency

Marketing operates as an in-house agency for the company and the products it produces. It crafts the verbal and visual language around a product to deliver clarity and differentiation to potential customers. It captures the stories of our users to expedite decision making for non-users. It creates the go-to-market strategy with an aim to drive biggest impact (ie awareness, impressions).

In this function, other departments across the organization act as a client would to an agency. Marketing is there to service them and, just like with an outside agency, sometimes these teams work well together and sometimes they struggle.

It’s in this function where the concept of ‘brand’ and creating compelling stories for the company itself is most often executed. Although, my hot take is that brand design, PR, and customer experience drives brand even more so than marketing but that’s for another day.

Careers in Agency:

• Marketing Strategist

• Content Marketer

• Brand & Creative

• Design

• Copywriter

• Product Marketing

I also like to include web design and development in this function as much as possible so that marketing can move swiftly and independently of other tech product projects.

Agency at work:

F*ck Oatly. Oat Milk was revered. Then ridiculed. Oatly’s marketing team fires back with great storytelling and design.

fckoatly.com

Growth

The second function of marketing is to drive growth. This is more quantitative than the Agency function and has to work closely with finance, sales, and leadership to forecast and deliver tangible growth in the form of customers and revenue.

Agency functions are what most people think of when they hear “marketing” but growth marketing has emerged over the past 10-15 years and is evolving insanely fast. Growth has become extremely complex and dynamic and brought a new set of skills within marketing departments.

Growth strategies and functions vary greatly from B2B to B2C, online to retail, hardware to software, and many other spectrums. Daily obsession over KPIs and knowing the levers that move them are required.

Careers in Growth:

• Growth Marketer

• Paid Media Marketer

• SEO Strategist

• Demand Generation

• Channel Manager

• Marketing Analyst

Growth at work:

External examples of Growth at work is hard to pinpoint because so much of the effort happens behind the scenes. Here’s a great breakdown of how Jack Rubin of Purdy & Figg achieved some step change’s in his brand’s growth pulling various levers.

Experience

And finally, there’s the role of engaging with existing customers and ensuring happy customers while driving growth from within via upselling and cross-selling. Most noticeably with subscription products & services, experience directly drives Lifetime Value and retention.

From a skillset perspective, the Experience driving functions of marketing teams tend to blend those of Agency and Growth nicely.

To build a better experience you have to quantitatively identify where and when the exit doors appear during the customer’s lifetime. Typically creating a retention curve or a churn analysis to do so.

Curiosity drives insight here:

Does the customer make it to the second purchase?

What customer characteristics at inception result in the most valuable customer over time?

Are we lacking loyalty or simply cyclical?

Careers in Experience:

• Email & SMS manager

• Customer Experience Manager

• Lifecycle Manager

• Retention Manager

• Community Manager

If you squint hard enough experience drives awareness and drives growth. If you try hard enough you can design it to do so.

Experience at Work:

I recently reconnected with a good friend of mine Justin Wiley. Justin and I worked together at Uber during our JUMP bikes days and he now runs business and marketing efforts at an amazing Shopify app called Replo.

Justin puts out a weekly newsletter, a weekly interview, a monthly podcast, and numerous community events. Replo even has a Slack community that has some how avoided going down the slippery slope of being a support channel.

The great experiences he’s delivering to his customers are keeping them sticky and insanely excited to be using Replo. Here’s the Replo community.

There it is. That was my modified response to a paraphrased question, “What do marketing teams do.” What do you think? Will this framework stick with you? Do you have a better one?

Always on the other side of your inbox if you hit reply.

Rikin