Managing marketing is more complex than playing the accordion

Scott Brinker (Chief Marketing Technologist – CTO of ion interactive) remarks that marketing automation has increased marketing management exponentially in complexity:
- Search marketing
- Social media marketing
- Email marketing
- Inbound marketing
- Content marketing
- Mobile marketing
- Behavioral targeting
- Semantic web marketing
Next to all the exiting conventional marketing tools and methods.
Print marketing, display marketing, event marketing, broadcast marketing, …

All of them require attention.
All of them are managed or just distributed by different people:
- People from the company
- People related to the company: like resellers
- People not related to the company: journalists, bloggers, friends
All through possible different channels.
- Some channels can be controlled: Press releases, company website, …
- Some channels beyond the control of the company: Review websites, forums, blogs, …
All of these different marketing messages through different channels interact with the customer.
The interaction is at different times on different occasions beyond marketing management control.

The result: a cacophony
The customer can get easily confused as not all messages match or are in sync: not a symphony but a cacophony.

Managing marketing more complex than accordion playing

It is like playing the accordion (squeezebox) with little knowledge about playing music: cacophony.
An accordion is a very complex instrument with two groups of many buttons and requiring moving the two halves in an opposite direction.
Managing marketing has become even more complex: many more buttons, many more channel, many more streams.

By trying to implement a simple management system on a very complex system is a guarantee for disaster. This relates to the chaos theory.

Information Technology solution feasible?

Scott Brinker sees an opportunity in developing information systems that will try to control the complexity of interactions of marketing channels and messages: orchestrating the cacophony into a symphony by Enterprise Marketing Management software. This is the Holy Grail for him.

As the complexity of the problems is huge, the systems will be costly to develop, to implement and to operate. Many flows, many interactions, many parameters, many real-time data input feeds.
We believe this will take a long time to come into existence.

The quest for the “Kanban” to solve the increasing complex marketing

This complexity seems similar to the complexity that Enterprise Resource Planning systems are facing in many production factories requiring the biggest computers to crunch the numbers for all the forecasts, orders, bill of materials and parts.

However in the eighties the Toyota Production System used a simple two bin system called Kanban in order to know the reorder point. For every part the delivery time was expressed by the number of pieces in a bin. When one bin was empty, the reorder was send.

If we could have a “Kanban” collecting all the marketing related data feeds (RSS) from the Internet or any other electronic data source like email and the company website, we would be able know when the Kanban is empty or full generating the trigger to start or stop with distributing marketing messages.

Could we find a solution as simple as a Kanban system for managing marketing?

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