There are over 6,000 languages spoken in the world today. It’s an incredible number and one that has grown impressively over the last 200,000 years. With that much evolution and with so many ideas to be shared, it’s not surprising that communicators may have things lost in translation. In a Canadian context, the top five languages spoken are English, French, Mandarin, Cantonese and Punjabi. And it doesn’t end there. In business, each industry has its own way of communicating amongst its professionals. The trouble is, that’s how miscommunication and misalignment can happen in organizations. Just look at finance leaders and their distaste for our often “creative” marketing jargon.
Using a common language in business is more important than you might think.
Words connote information which – when employed correctly – has meaning. When words are expressed to others, there is the opportunity to create relationships. Such relationships are essential to how we can successfully work with others. Having seen firsthand the opportunities for alignment (and sometimes mis-alignment) between Finance and Marketing teams, In Partnership With sought to explore a deeper understanding of the relationship between CFOs and CMOs.
To get to the bottom of this disconnect, Mo Dezyanian, President of Empathy Inc., shares his perspective based on the latest research. What he found is that CFOs and CMOs are often simply not speaking the same language. Empathy Inc. is a Media Consulting Group engineered for the C-suite and leverages Mo’s nearly 15 years of experience with marketing analysis, media planning, teaching and marketing curriculum development. Mo is also a mentor, council member and advisor to educational organizations in the marketing profession.
Finding Common Ground
Marketers are often criticised by other business professionals as being “creative” or “fluffy” or “liars.” And some are. But most are hardworking, ethical and data-driven. Especially today. Mo recalls early on in his career that one of his longer term clients would have weekly status updates with the agency he was working for. Finance team members would join the discussions and Mo’s team would review the great accomplishments that had been achieved that week. Things like CRM entries for new leads generated, new content pushed out and the metrics associated with it (watches, views, listens, etc) and how the rollout of the marketing plan was going relative to what was earlier approved.
The trouble was that the Finance team would constantly ask Mo’s marketing team the same question. And it was “so what?” Mo remembers that it was a weekly battle to justify the marketing investments and initiatives that had already been approved. Marketing believed that they were to maintain brand consistency, build awareness with target consumers, support early lead generation for the Sales team. But that wasn’t good enough for Finance. To them, Mo laughs, that was all just marketing jargon. Finance wanted dollars in the door. Yesterday.
That experience made Mo reflect and try to understand why senior leadership was on board with the Marketing plan but Finance wasn’t. Mo started researching the role of marketing in an organization and found an interesting study which had one simple premise.
According to some researchers, the sole purpose of marketing is to improve the company’s cash flow.
That is the only objective marketing should ever have and nothing else. What struck Mo with that research was that a lot of it focused on digging into how marketers speak with their financial counterparts.
Closing the Gap on Marketing Jargon with CFOs
Fast forward to about a year ago. Mo was having dinner with a research friend and it became apparent how there’s a language gap between how marketers talk about marketing, and how finance professionals perceive marketing. Together, they set out to find out what the differences actually are and specifically, “what is it that makes marketers speak a different language?” What became clear was the most common point of intersection between Marketing and Finance was budget season. Mo has experienced that Marketing departments ask for a budget or try to justify a budget while Finance signs off on it.
So the question arose of how does one research such an interaction? How do organizations determine Marketing budgets? How do marketers demonstrate results to Finance? What is it about talking to Finance that makes Marketing teams nervous? How does Finance perceive such conversations?
What do CFOs need from marketers to comfortably and confidently sign off on the budget?
Finally, with an evident disconnect, what does that do to a culture and what does that do to a business? When you are speaking different languages, there’s an opportunity for mis-alignment. And we can all agree that inter-departmental disconnects help no one.
Allocating Scarce Funding for Marketing Today
Mo has reflected and found that the way most organizations fund marketing is based on how much money an organization thinks it has. And how much money is thought to be available in the future based on sales or revenue. The research, and Mo’s experience, suggest this is sub-optimal. Considering outside factors is an important one. For instance, what are competitors doing or how much share of voice is currently enjoyed (or needed) to meet goals? What’s the competitive positioning? What is the target consumer thinking? All of those factors require research and insights.
The challenge is that everyone agrees decision-makers need more insights and more research. But it goes deeper.
Marketers need more people who can decipher the available data into real business decision making parameters.
Mo reflects that because there is a language barrier between Finance and Marketing, often businesses under-invest in marketing efforts. Or, if the resources are available, there’s a need to make more sense of the data. This all leaves them flying somewhat blind. As a result, organizations are more driven by intuition and experience than driven by insights and objective, decision making. So what’s happened? Teams are not doing a good job of making the right calls today because they’re not speaking the same language.
Bridging the Marketing Jargon Gap
Reflecting on the challenge, Mo recalls a funny example in some recent CMO conversations. Take the marketing jargon of “working media dollars.” During the research exercise, the study talked to CFO counterparts and found they don’t know what that means. That’s just not nomenclature that they use. For marketers, it’s often intuitive in that you’re spending a portion of resources to create assets (“non-working”) while spending another portion to promote such assets (“working”). Simple, right? It is – but only if you’re “in the Marketing club.”
Mo continues with another example around the concept of “brand loyalty.” Again, as CFOs reported, they don’t understand this marketing jargon. For marketers, it’s all about remaining relevant and ensuring fewer people will turn away from your brand and go to a competitor. For CFOs, their language for the same concept is about reducing “customer churn.” That’s a very common business metric outside of marketing.
So what do we do about this? Mo suggests that marketers need – at all levels – to educate themselves in business nomenclature. And not just for finance, but for all other teams to start to really talk using the same words. Their words.
Making up terminology has not done marketers any favours. But many marketers still love it.
The research shows, Mo suggests, that if you talk in terms of cash flow, customer churn, P&L and balance sheets, that is going to get marketers much much farther ahead. Marketing is not about being “creative” or “crafty” or “fancy.” It’s certainly not about creating new marketing jargon. It’s about supporting and realizing tangible business objectives. It’s not about chasing the shiny objects – and Mo admits there’s a lot of that in marketing today – to the detriment of many organizations. Consider: is it important to be on the very latest social media platform (which may be fun and interesting and “cutting-edge” for some marketers)? Or is it more important to tangibly deliver results for your business or clients? The choice is clear.
The Future of the C-Suite Relationships
So where do we go from here? Mo suggests that the funny thing is when he talks to CEOs and CFOs, more than you would think actually want to be marketers. A lot of people in finance want to be active in the marketing space since they think it looks cool. It’s more creative and possibly more stimulating than “staid” financial functions. Mo thinks that’s a good opener for marketers.
There’s a strong appetite on the other side of the table with CFOs to understand the marketing world.
So Mo thinks over the next little Marketing should go back to the required business discipline considerations. It’s becoming apparent that marketing today is not just about the really creative campaign that ran. And, Mo continues, CFOs are trying to expand their role because they want to expand beyond perceptions of being simply the people who count the numbers. CFOs want to deliver a more strategic position. So do CMOs. As a result, there’s a greater opportunity for healthier conversations between the two worlds than we’ve had in years.
In Partnership With
Mo Dezyanian is the President of Empathy Inc., a Media Consulting Group engineered for the C-suite. Mo’ has nearly 15 years of experience with marketing analysis, media planning, teaching and marketing curriculum development. Mo is also a mentor, council member and advisor to educational organizations in the marketing profession.
Tim Bishop, CM is a multi-disciplined executive with a proven record of optimizing strategic efforts to expand the influence of leading organizations, such as the Canadian Marketing Association, Cineplex Entertainment, Lavalife.com, IMI International and Northstar Research Partners. In Partnership With is his latest focus to curate Canadian marketing experts to celebrate the power of strategic partnerships in a perspective-based content series.