Marketing: Disrupted and Simplified (Part 1)

Overview

Over the past year, I have written extensively about two marketing ideas: Velvet Rope Marketing (VRM) to provide differentiated experiences to Best Customers and Microns to engage and reactivate Rest Customers. I have also done over a hundred presentations to marketers in India and South-East Asia on these ideas. During this period, my own thinking has evolved, and I have realised that there is a need to provide a simplified view of this new marketing framework. This is what we will discuss in this long series.

The topics I will cover are:

  • How marketers have erred by focusing excessively on acquisition of future customers and not enough on attention from their present customers and thus created past customers
  • The disruption coming because of Google’s decision on third-party cookies and Apple’s new privacy features, and their compounding impact on marketing
  • The 90:10 adtech:martech skew, as shown in a survey of India’s adtech and martech spends
  • The broken state of marketing today: how marketers ignore existing customers…
  • …and how customers have been trained to ignore marketing messages
  • …thus creating a chasm, and sending marketers into the “doom loop” of a perpetual acquisition arms race
  • Marketing’s Power Law: 20% of customers generate 60% of revenues and 200% of profits
  • How marketers are leaving money on the table by not understanding the fact that “all customers (and attention) are not equal”
  • How marketers can win back their customers’ attention – by making it the new acquisition
  • Building the attention stack, starting with CDP, CLV and BCG
  • How marketers can imagine the ideal business endgame: a profipoly
  • Rethinking the marketing core with teams for Best, Rest and Next customers
  • The big idea: to get customers to pay attention, pay for attention; think Microns and Mu
  • How to make it happen: why the modern marketer needs a quartet of ‘robots’: ABC, C2E2, M3 and AMB
  • Why it will take a constellation of companies to bring this new world to life
  • The choice CEOs and marketers face: growing profits for Google-Facebook or their own

This is a journey with many deteours. Not all of them may be initially obvious, but look at is taking the scenic route! There’s a lot to learn and understand. And at the end, I will provide a summary of the key points to show the path to simplifying marketing and starting the journey to higher profits. Off we go!

Published by

Rajesh Jain

An Entrepreneur based in Mumbai, India.