Jerome Nadel is a psychologist, and he’s diagnosed most CMOs with a problem.
While he is not a clinical psychologist, Jerome trained in ‘applied experimental’ psychology and understands the boundaries of human cognition and how to apply that to design. The field formed the foundation of what we understand about user experience today.
“I’m being provocative here, but I think executive marketing has turned into marketing automation,” the CMO of Rambus tells B2B Marketing. “Most executive marketers have KPIs that cover putting systems in place, plus knowing the customer and how to reach out to them in a detailed, personified, segmented way. That’s really about promotion – from a customer’s awareness to their purchase decision.”
He argues the more exciting work, what he describes as the ‘upstream’ activity – strategy, experimentation, gathering user stories – form the narrative for the promotion, and this should take place before the ‘downstream’ promotion.
“Of course promotion is super important, but the art is connecting it to the product,” he adds. “An executive recruiter, who’s a marketer herself, once told me that executive marketers who own product marketing are real CMOs, and those who don’t are not. That hit me in the gut, because I don’t have all of product marketing at Rambus reporting to me.”
It’s not just physical products he’s talking about; it could be whatever you sell. What Jerome advocates is that executive marketers become as involved in this upstream activity as they are in the downstream stuff.
Success factors
In addition to his role at Rambus, Jerome is also president of the Silicon Valley chapter of the CMO Club. To evidence his argument, he conducted a survey among 64 peers establishing the correlation between the success of product launches and how involved the marketing leader was in the upstream and downstream activity.
The results? Those with a product launch success rate greater than 50% were much more likely to be involved upstream than their less successful counterparts.
Jerome explains: “When you look at ‘prototyping and experimentation’ for example (see chart below), it suggests a correlation – there were more folks responding and when they did, it corresponded with more successful launches.
“In contrast more of those who talked about ‘waterfall development’ reported they had launches that were not successful. And I’m sorry for the market researchers and analysts, but the findings were that if you sit at your desk and let others tell you about your market, you’re probably associated with launches that aren’t successful.”
The takeaway from this, he says, is that you need to play an active role in making sure the product and service your company is designing is effective – and then couple that with effective promotion. If you’re involved early on, says Jerome, you’ll be far more than a sales enabler. You’ll be a partner in conception and development, plus everything that flows from that will be far more authentic. This alternative approach is user-centered design, also referred to as ‘design-think’.
Blocked at the source
So what’s holding back today’s marketing leaders from being involved in upstream activity?
Jerome believes that as an organisation grows and its focus moves to P&L, business unit leaders are under pressure to make their numbers. They become less transversal and less collaborative.
Consequently, marketing and the marketing leader’s role are seen as a downstream ‘enabler’. People associate the marketing efforts with promoting, advertising, awareness, lead generation and sales. “I think both as an executive sitting at the table, and as a marketer, it’s a bad trend. It makes marketers less effective,” Jerome adds.
“We talk about how everyone loves stories, and not to be disrespectful or overly provocative, but you’re just making up stories like they’re a veneer. You’re not even cooking the dish you’re going to talk about,” he argues.
But are marketers turning their backs on product management because it is perceived to be unexciting?
Jerome encourages an alternative view. In engineering companies, he says, there’s typically no difference between product marketing and product management. It’s an engineer’s approach, which focuses on following a process – ticking off the things that need to be done with very little creativity involved.
He managed to change the approach at Rambus. The division in which he owns product marketing drew a Venn diagram with a product marketer on the left, and a product manager on the right. This was to show what similarities there are between the two roles, depending on the product line. That enables leaders to give better assistance depending on whether they need more, or less, product marketing support.
Soul-searching questions
Digging further into Jerome’s argument could prompt further soul-searching. In complex B2B industries (in which products and services can be highly technical) how many marketing leaders truly understand the intricacies and detail of the products they’re marketing? How many understand them enough to effectively contribute to the design phase?
“What we [as B2B marketers] do is complicated and esoteric, and it’s not easy to get it,” says Jerome. “We’re learning it incrementally until we have that revelation when we get it – not just at a veneer level, and then it’s more comfortable.”
If you don’t know what you do, you can’t be of any help, he explains. And you need to demonstrate how you can add value in highly technical environments. If you can’t, you’ll won’t be respected and will be told to buzz off and make an advert or a factsheet. You need to show both why your view is valuable and what’s behind your thinking.
So how should a leader get more involved in the upstream activity? One area, Jerome proposes, is early internal involvement. One of the biggest problems he says, is the failure to sell marketing requirement documents (MRD) internally when new products are introduced.
“When the product marketer sits at their desk and creates the MRD it doesn’t have any life. And here’s where marketing and influence is so important – you need to get your internal audience excited about what you’re doing, you need to paint your vision of what it’s going to be like when it’s done,” he says. When this doesn’t happen the concept often falls flat. And if you’re not testing at this stage you won’t get the all-important customer voice.
“At that point of concept and design, my group creates beautiful collateral. I don’t mean factsheets – it could be UI demos – but they use it to get structured, critical and positive feedback on what we’re doing. Once that feedback is in, the product requirements document gets better because we’ve already done some iterative ‘voice of the customer’ validation.”
But leaders might face a more fundamental challenge in that any involvement in upstream activity is questioned. So how should one sell it into the business?
“You have to bring real value,” advises Jerome. “In today’s world things like voice of the customer are important. Number one, I don’t just want to promote with my eyes closed, I want to be close to the voice of the customer – so understand what’s going on with them. And often if you’re in B2B you have to go past your direct customer and go to their customer.”
Jerome is a big advocate of design-thinking and advices marketers to brush up on this as well as the idea of being empathic with the end customer. You can do this by thinking of use cases and how you will tell a story about your product and service.
Applying design-led thinking at Rambus
The history of Rambus, says Jerome, is almost like a Dan Brown novel. In 1990 two Stanford University graduates, Mark Horowitz and Mike Farmwald, came up with an interface architecture that multiplied the speed data could move from RAM to a processor – a requirement for the next generation of computing.
The company went public with a hugely successful IPO in 1997, and drove much of the revenue it earned through licensing patents for these chip interfaces to customers. But the company’s “assertive” approach to licensing won it few friends, and a few years of heavy litigation saw the stock price fall to a low.
Former CEO Ron Black was brought in, and Jerome – who had worked with him at MobiWire – joined shortly after in 2012 as CMO. “There’s nothing wrong with licensing if you give value. You want to stabilise that base of revenue by getting long term contracts with those who license, and you want to make products out of the inventions you have,” says Jerome. “That’s been the transition and our market cap quadrupled, the stock has climbed 4x. We’re still getting there, but it’s been a big change on how folks in the company see themselves.
“When I came in, it was a very engineering-led company. There wasn’t a CMO, and Ron asked me to come in with a seat at the table and contribute to strategy, a way forward, and product and service thinking. I think, humbly, that has really changed the company, and clearly with my executive peers we play a very important, connected role.”
