Let’s not forget about brands. Let’s not forget about our messaging. Let’s not forget about how a brand connects to a market.

When you think about your brand, do you really (and truly) understand the importance of the creativity behind it. We’re inundated with technology (data, analytics, automation, platforms, channels and more). With that, the conversation tends to be more about “where” the brand is connected, and much less about “how” that brand is connected. The difference is not semantics. The difference is, ultimately, about who will be the winners, and who will be the losers in your industry’s vertical.

What do the top performing marketing teams do?

What if we started there? What would we uncover? What could we learn and replicate to get our brands to be a top performer? This morning, MarketingCharts published an article titled, What Do Top-Performing Marketers Do Differently? Clickbait or not, that headline got my attention. It turns out that Salesforce released their State of Marketing report that surveyed over 4000 marketing chiefs across various countries. With that, they were able to rank what these top performing teams were doing. This was the list of characteristics that the Salesforce study identified:

• Have adopted a customer journey strategy as part of its overall business strategy.
• Are active at mapping the customer journey.
• Are implementing digital transformation across the company.
• Excel at collaborating with other business units.
• Excel at integrating business systems.
• Excel at creating personalized omni-channel customer experience across all business units. 
• Currently using CRM tools.
• Extensively use predictive intelligence.
• Extensively use web personalization.
• Are substantially increasing spending on marketing tools and technology.
• Say their executive team is completely committed to the overall marketing strategy.
• Have integrated mobile marketing strategy into overall marketing strategy.
• Have integrated email marketing strategy into overall marketing strategy.
• Have integrated social media marketing strategy into overall marketing strategy.
• Extensively use user-generated content for content marketing.

The results are varying.

From the study: “Some 18% of the survey respondents are ‘extremely satisfied’ with the current outcomes realized as a direct result of their company’s marketing investment. These constitute the ’high performers,’ whose actions and initiatives are contrasted with ’moderate performers’ (the 68% who are very or moderately satisfied with their outcomes) and the ’under performers’ (the 14% who are slightly or not at all satisfied with their outcomes).” What’s most interesting about these results is how different these “top performers” look today, if we did the same study a mere ten years ago.

Here’s the thing…

I’m fortunate enough to work with some of the most fascinating brands in the world. They all have strategy decks that talk about customer-centricity, being technology agnostic, digitally-focused and a myriad of other industry buzzwords. With that, what are we really talking about? We want people to love our brands. We want our team members to love the brand that they work for and represent. We want our customers to buy from us, and enjoy their products and services so much that they would not hesitate to both buy from us again, and tell everyone that they know about us. That’s about it. Everything listed above is just an ever-growing list of more complicated and technology-driven ways for all of us to get to our result in a more efficient way. Don’t mistaken the two. CRM, business systems, digital transformation, web personalization, and everything else listed above won’t stand for much if you can’t get people to love your brand.

Are you up for some love?