Earlier this week, Andrew Frank and I published a post on HBR.org called “What Data-Obsessed Marketers Don’t Understand.” Here, we unveiled Gartner’s Intelligent Brand Framework, which we believe will become very useful for helping marketing leaders build and balance broad interdisciplinary skills.
Why is this so important? Because high-performing marketing organizations lead by both head and heart, exhibiting strength in a broad range of data-centric and human-centric competencies across both strategic and operational domains. The Intelligent Brand Framework (below) helps you identify your power center, flex zones and areas of weakness as the foundation for purposeful, balanced thinking.
But don’t marketing leaders already do this by habit or accident?
Isn’t this pretty much a reptilian reflex for marketers?
Actually, not at all.
Too often, marketers submit to the insidious, inexorable force of the shiny object. It’s human nature to bow our heads faithfully to the gravitational pull of shiny and new. Social. Mobile. Big Data. The next new thing can become like the broaching humpback drawing overzealous whale watchers blindly to the starboard rail, as each passenger’s good-intentioned enthusiasm adds up to a precarious loss of balance.
The same thing happens in marketing organizations. All the time. These shiny objects may not measure up to the majesty of megafauna in full breach, but they do capture our collective attention and imagination perhaps more than you realize. The risk? Irrational exuberance and inflated expectations for the areas of active investment and the opposite for areas perhaps less shiny and new.
This imbalance is a silent threat to sustained marketing performance.
Thus, the Intelligent Brand Framework.
But think of this as more than a static model. We expect this framework to become the basis for prescriptive patterns that help guide your organization through dynamic digital marketing terrain.
Stay tuned. More to come on the Intelligent Brand Framework.
In the meantime, tell us what you think. Oh, and read the full article here.
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