Robert Manning Case Studies

About Robert Manning

A few thoughts about ...

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Marketing in a post-Covid-19 World

 

We are entering an era where marketing will need to be even more accountable than before, where most brands will have less resources and streamlined budgets. It seems too many companies start with the How & the tech stack around transformation versus the What and the Why - what business challenges are we trying to solve and why would customers care? This is more important than ever as marketing needs reinvent its mission and justify itself – we must start with the strategy first. Then relentlessly measure performance and ruthlessly prioritize. 

 

Fostering Collaboration

 

There are a lot of smart digital thinkers out there but getting people to work more collaboratively is an area I’m obsessed about. I believe there is so much waste and redundancy in our day-to-day digital marketing deployments and most organizations don't foster a sharing culture. I enjoy coming up with creative ways to make better use of our most important assets – namely our people and their knowledge, often distributed across the organization – to develop a more collaborative culture to leverage best practices, use lead markets, and develop a test-and-learn mentality. The key is to create sustained changes that take root, and allow organizations to become better marketers in a digital world. 

 

Digital Transformation

 

How do you create sustained change that suits your particular organizational culture? From my experience there are a few keys to accomplish this:

 

• The CEO is bought in and driving change

• Budgets are aligned to the vision for change, and not necessarily driven only by IT

• It's important to keep an open mindset – there are no sacred totems – but top line growth and improved customer experience are the top priorities for most firms

• Organize change via a cross-functional digital council that sets the vision and the roadmap of capabilities needed to support the vision

• Take an outside-in approach to innovation – look outside company and category for inspiration and best practices – with so many incredible opportunities you need a disciplined methodology to filter and prioritize 

• Create a roadmap and measurement scorecard that keeps everyone on the same page, and ensures accountability

• Develop an enterprise data strategy – how to make better use of web, social, location aware data, third party data, etc.

• Develop a clear multi-year roadmap (the what) and skill sets and organizational design (the how) to effectively deliver projects that drive innovation

 

Please contact me to discuss how I can help drive innovative change and digital excellence within your organization. Thanks for visiting!

 

--Robert