Brands must stop dissing customers

Marketers need to be respectful to consumers and start creating better work, according to industry provocateur Tom Goodwin.

Tom Goodwin is a marketing consultant and co-founder of All We Have is Now.

Marketers need to focus on consumers, simplicity and bridging the gap between performance and brand to create better work, All We Have is Now co-founder Tom Goodwin says.

The marketing consultant delivered a call to arms for the industry in a keynote address to the ADMA Global Forum last week in Sydney, where he urged marketers to be more confident and apply more common sense to their work.

Speaking afterwards to The Growth Agenda, Mr Goodwin said the aim of the talk was to ­remind marketers of the discipline’s importance to the consumer, rather than getting over­whelmed by all the shiny tech and possibilities.

“There’s only one department in most companies that represent the customer; most companies have hundreds of people in fin­ance, procurement and the supply chain but generally speaking the only department that looks after the customer, which is the whole reason the company exists, is marketing,” he said. “We need to create an environment where those voices are heard more readily.”

Mr Goodwin, a renowned industry provocateur who spent years in agencies such as Publicis and MullenLowe, pointed to the current trend among marketers to be disparaging of the consumer, something he claims is not helping CMOs to prove their worth to the rest of the c-suite.

“We’ve really lost respect for our customer,” he said. “A lot of brands are quite dismissive of their consumers. We are making it quite hard to be a consumer these days. We are pushing customers away. In advertising, we spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year talking to get people but the moment they try to reply to something we say, we give it to an offshore call centre or AI to reply to them. It’s outrageous.”

Mr Goodwin also took aim at the current market divisions of brand versus performance and urged marketers to embrace both the data and creative sides of the business – particularly as the short-term focus continues to dominate.

“Marketers are being asked harder questions. And in that environment they need to have a dual approach, one is to have very good robust – where possible – scientifically proven and data-­supported answers. They are many things that we can show.

“We can show the long-term impact of advertising and we can show the satisfied consumers’ view. One can go into those arguments with data. But half of the job just has to be you’ve given me a job because you believe I am good at my job so give me the freedom and believe in me.

“We need to find a healthy balance where we trust people who are good, we monitor things a bit more closely, we understand that most of the things that matter can’t really be measured but we should get more data to feel our way properly.

“We’ve been told that if you want to understand something, it’s to get close to it. I’ve realised that if you really want to know something, step back and see change in the context of time and the world and other cultures and geographies. Just take a step back and focus on being a human.

“We are now in an environment where we are putting ads closer and closer to the point of purchase, because it’s easier to demonstrate success. A very good example is retail media; if you buy extra placements on Coca-Cola so that every time someone buys a Coke you can say that was 25 per cent x ROI. No one went to that page and bought Coca-Cola that had never heard of Coca-Cola before. We are dealing with a lot of sneaky attribution where people are in a rush to take credit.”

DANIELLE LONG