The days of the full-service agency are well and truly over.
The marketing ecosystem is simply too complex for any one team to have the multi-disciplinary expertise to deliver the goods without compromise.
Where digital was once considered a skill set, it’s now a collection of highly technical, specialist disciplines.
SEO, email, PPC, social, content, influencer, affiliate and mobile marketing have very different goals, mechanics and methodologies.
For a CMO, this can feel like herding cats.
Where agency and media strategists once mapped a highly-considered audience journey, multiple channels now exist with no consideration of what’s going on around them.
So, not surprisingly, consumers often have several, disconnected conversations with brands. Some recognise a relationship, while others treat you like a stranger.
Tone of voice is often the first to suffer. While top-of-funnel awareness might have wit and warmth, down at the pointy end, more feature-driven, retail-focused comms tend to be more clinical in their delivery.
But more importantly, the central, defining role of the brand may be lost.
Great brands maintain a coherent, underlying message across all comms. Coherence, not consistency.
An effective TikTok vid must be as true to the channel culture as it is to the brand personality. So it will naturally feel completely different to the Insta post or Youtube content. But, crucially, the central message will come from the same place.
Brand and retail are not mutually exclusive. They combine to give consumers an emotional reason to want and a rational reason to buy. Put simply, all brand comms should reinforce retail, and all retail comms should support brand.
And that takes an authentic, relevant, differentiating value proposition at the centre of all your comms - a clearly-defined, central organising idea.
The question is, who’s organising yours?
Thanks for reading.