Provocations and practicalities for making marketing more effective, efficient and enjoyable
Marketing has more potential today than ever before. But there’s often a gap between where marketing is and where it could be.
The Line in the Sand, a collaboration between WhichWayUp and The Marketing Society explores how a discipline built to drive business growth became increasingly fragmented, short-term and associated with communications rather than commercial performance, and what businesses can do about it.
The paper explores how most of marketing’s biggest opportunities are not found in another campaign, platform or dashboard, but rather sit inside organisations. In how well they understand customers, the capability they have to act, and the culture that gives marketing permission to influence what matters.
The WhichWayUp Sweetspot™
At the heart of the paper is The WhichWayUp Sweetspot™ which frames the three forces of Customer, Capability & Culture; a proprietary marketing effectiveness framework originated WhichWayUp founder, Johnny Corbett.
Customer: How well you understand and influence the people whose money drives the business.
Capability: Whether you have the skills, structures, systems and processes to deliver.
Culture: Whether marketing has the authority and permission to shape what matters within the business.
Strength in one cannot compensate for weakness in another, and how they work together critically impacts the efficiency, effectiveness and enjoyment of marketing within a business.
Putting thesis into practice
The Line in the Sand is an industry analysis, a thesis if you like; WhichWayUp’s core service helps organisations turn that thinking into their own Way of Marketing, diagnosing the opportunity, aligning teams and embedding a repeatable way of doing things, all laddering up to the overarching business ambition.