Context marketing as I’ve outlined it in this book is the future of marketing, brands, and your business. But these aren’t simple iterations. The reality is that making any of the changes we’ve explored here will take time and a significant amount of work. Most of all, they’ll require the full support of and buy-in from the executive team, which brings us to the very first step you will need to take: proving to your top executives that contextual marketing is the correct path forward.
Change isn’t easy, and getting your executive team to give up old methods of driving demand to embrace a radically new one is no small task. Executives are often the hardest to persuade of anyone in the organization. What will it take to change their minds, especially when your new idea will shift the structure of the business? I’ve seen only two ways to persuade a top executive to embrace ideas that require significant change: (1) a paid consultant or esteemed colleague (outside the firm) made the case for change, or (2) the executive team was persuaded by internal testing.
Consultants are a gamble. There are way too many of them, and very few are excellent. So do your homework if you take that road. In 2013, the Atlantic Monthly reported that there were 181,345 social media experts available for hire (and surely many, many more today).1 I did my own investigation of that list, and far too many had no formal education or practical expertise of any kind. And from what I could determine from their LinkedIn profiles, even those with practical expertise tend to hold onto their beliefs rather than changing them over time. If they do change, it’s typically just an iteration; rarely do consultants give up their lifeblood in exchange for something fresh. It’s too risky to their business. So be careful.
Another way to gain buy-in is for someone in your CEO’s inner circle to make the case for you. But it’s unlikely you’ll have access to those people. You will, however, have this book. And I have found that many CEOs are voracious readers who can be persuaded by a strong, well-structured argument in a book. That’s one of the main reasons I wrote this book—to help provide that “outside voice” that might make your case for these seemingly radical ideas.
But perhaps more convincing still, your team could experiment with a contextual effort using agile processes to create a minimum viable experience (MVE), as described in chapter 12’s discussion of the agile process. Start small, iterate, and when you achieve success, present it to your CEO—along with this book. Backing up your case with internal data is always going to get more attention from leaders at the highest level.
Part of getting executive buy-in also means making a case for the budget you’ll need to execute contextual marketing programs. The Salesforce 2016 State of Marketing research found that high-performing marketing organizations are increasing their marketing budgets in every category. The lowest rate of increase across traditional marketing spend, digital marketing spend, marketing consulting, marketing technology, and marketing headcount was 39 percent and went as high as 70 percent.2 At the lowest level of investment, a budget growing at 39 percent per year will double in 1.8 years.
Of course, a significant increase in funding isn’t likely to happen all at once. Usually it happens incrementally, growing alongside proven results. To accelerate that growth, you can adopt what I call a stretch budget.
The idea of a stretch budget is simple: when you have an idea that you need to prove out, there should be a small fund you can access to create a case study. The trick to getting this budget is twofold. First, the conversation must happen before you need the money; and second, there must be defined rules for accessing the funds. Let’s look at each of these qualifying characteristics.
First, the funding conversation with your boss has to happen before you need the money, because your stretch budget will operate much like a line of credit from a bank. It is negotiated beforehand, set aside, and accessed only when a specific set of criteria has been met.
When having the conversation about creating a stretch budget, couch it as an investment. If you can prove the effort you wish to undertake has a high and definable value, the company can then invest more at the right time. In setting up the terms of the deal, you must define the value on which success will be determined. Value can be measured in lots of ways, such as increased lead generation, registration numbers, total engagement, or pipeline improvement. The stretch is the delta by which you must improve the selected value metric.
For example, if your value is webinar registrations and your stretch number is 50 percent, you would have to drive a 50 percent increase in webinar attendance over your current goal. So if your goal was 300 registrants but you hit 450, you’ve just opened up an additional stretch budget to build out the contextual approach you leveraged to reach your stretch goal.
Second, have in mind the criteria for accessing the stretch budget so you can present that to your boss along with the preliminary funding proposition. Together you’ll define the final criteria (or perhaps just your boss will), but bring to your meeting a possible answer to this question: How much of the total budget will be accessible at one time? A predetermined portion—instead of the whole amount after your first success—does a better job of getting leadership and other partners across the business to buy into the idea of testing and allocating budget for it. Once your idea has proven successful, then double down on those methods. Taking only a portion also allows for the stretch budget to be accessed multiple times.
With funds in place, you’ll be able to test out your new ideas for creating contextual brand experiences and prove their value one at a time. That will grow your budget from your current starting point to where it needs to be, proving your methods to executive leadership and any skeptics every step of the way.
To review: gaining executive buy-in to engage with contextual marketing processes is paramount. Without it, you’ll have neither the internal support to move past your historical scope nor the budget to execute a continuous flow of experiences. What’s more, you’ll be held back by old methods of reporting. To be sure, context marketing is not a small shift for businesses to make. But it’s nonnegotiable for the survival of brands today. The proof is all around us, with brands of all shapes and sizes, spanning all corners of the globe, already embracing the kinds of contextual customer experiences that make marketing in the infinite media era tick.
But what if you can’t get your executive team on board? This is a real possibility and one I’d like to address with you, the reader, on this very personal note: You have a career to consider, and you must keep in mind your future and your current employer’s role in it. If you are unable to persuade your executives, team, or brand to move forward, consider whether you’re in a company that’s going to grow with the market—or fall irrevocably behind. Remember, not all brands survive. A brand that doesn’t want to change is a brand in decline, and tying yourself to a sinking ship does you no good. Seek out companies that are willing to embrace change.
Meanwhile, think about this: every so often, a time in history emerges when radical change upends everything, and we look back at these periods as the “wild west” or the “golden days.” As marketers, we look back to the time when branding and mass advertising swept through the world and created the rise of the adman (and fifty years later came the TV series to document it). Such magical periods of time are often hard to discern while we’re in their midst. But make no mistake: we are in one of those periods now.
Perhaps such radical times are hard to identify because we continue trying to explain the changes through our preexisting ideas. Today our continued limited media era thinking leads us to focus on Tesla’s Elon Musk—or the technology and design of Tesla cars—without giving credit to the company’s deep, intrinsic understanding of context and its impeccable marketing execution as a primary driver of the business. Tesla’s success and that of Airbnb and so many other breakout brands is often credited to the creative idea of the product. Yes, those ideas are radical and their products revolutionary, but an idea without proper execution fails.
Context marketing is how those brands grew, how they got their ideas to take hold. Calling it a revolution is not hyperbole. It is radical because it’s what our time demands, and revolutionary because it is operating on a new foundation. Context is the new idea of marketing that brands must embrace—or suffer a slow but sure decline. Grim words, but on the other hand it’s exciting to think about the impact our work can now have. In every industry, for-profit and nonprofits alike—education, consumer goods, healthcare, financial services, automotive, software, big or small, you name it—the same story holds true: brands that understand the significance of the infinite media era and see the power of context are not just succeeding. They are dominating the global marketplace.
Context isn’t a marketing trick. It certainly isn’t the evolution of old ideas. It’s a revolution, a fundamental resetting of how we think about and execute business, driven by the greatest force of all—media. Marshall McLuhan had it right fifty years ago: the medium is the message. And the message is loud and clear: context is the revolutionary power we must use to break through the infinite noise, to motivate the modern buyer, and to drive growth.