Our Guest Presenter: Shubu Mitra
Our June 9th, 2021, Utah DMC live online event welcomed Shubu Mitra, COO, and co-founder of MarCaps, based out of Atlanta, Georgia. MarCaps is a new consulting agency made up of five members that bring over 50+ years of marketing experience.
Prior to MarCaps, Shubu worked for Agile Measurement and managed the online and offline marketing, advertising, and promotion efforts through agile data-driven approaches. Shubu has a background in not only online and offline marketing but also worked in connection effectiveness with Coca-Cola, where he led their global effectiveness efforts for brand marketing.
This is Shubu's first time presenting for Utah DMC, and we were thrilled to have him here to present: Three Things Marketing Organizations Can Do to Drive Growth.
Doc and AJ had a blast on this live broadcast with Shubu, and now we are thrilled to share the opportunity for you to learn from Shubu as well via this recap and event replay. (Note: This post is a high-level recap. At the end of this post you can watch the entire replay of the event with audience Q&A, as well as download her full presentation deck from the BrightTalk interface.)
Let's Get Started...
The Three Marketing Channels
Shubu started off his talk by speaking about how marketing today is evolving faster than ever before, as demonstrated through three main channels:
- The emergence of new technology
- The evolution of consumer expectations
- The emergence of new competition
Shubu uses a great example on the last one to show what he is talking about. He bought a mattress from an online site—which had never even occurred to him before the opportunity became available. But it’s a nice option for the consumer, especially since Shubu didn’t have to tie a new mattress to the roof of his minivan to get it home from the store! This is a great example of how new ideas can drive new competition.
These three channels demand varied and complex practices that are made up of many different styles.
These are all examples of how businesses are trying to adapt to this new, constantly changing marketing landscape. Companies don’t have a choice—they have to evolve and adapt. The downside is that satisfaction with this spectrum is very low. 80% of managers are dissatisfied with the operating effectiveness of marketing at their companies.
Shubu conducted this research through a partnership with the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) that studied 130 marketing organizations in a two-year research study. The MMA was essential in getting a look “under the hood” of these different companies. The researchers were able to see:
- What the agencies were doing
- What wasn't working
- The pain points they were experiencing.
The Three Reasons Behind Dissatisfaction with Marketing Effectiveness
Nobody wants to consider an 80% dissatisfaction rate in any metric. Shubu found the following reasons that contributed to that percentage.
1. Prioritizing Activities Over Value
There can be too much focus on pursuing a flurry of activity, instead of zeroing in on what has the most value.
For example, some companies were hyper-focused on optimizing individual siloed channels. They didn’t even consider that they were missing out on countless opportunities to engage the customer outside of those few channels.
2. Lack of Resources to Master New Skills
Mastery of an ever-growing list of new capabilities demands increasing levels of resources.
Is it any wonder that so many agencies are having a hard time? With so many new marketing capabilities to potentially pursue, how do you know what’s the most important for your agency and your clients? No one has the resources to master everything, so it can get overwhelming to pinpoint what’s essential for your team.
3. Difficulty in Managing a Large, Diverse Team
A large team that includes specialists with vastly different backgrounds strains people development programs.
Attempting to gain proficiency in multiple areas leads to a great deal of hiring diversity. According to Shubu: “The reality is that no technology in the world, no digital marketing, no people-based approach, no multi-channel, no multi-device, no attribution model, can overcome a lack of alignment across an organization.”
The Six Areas Where Marketing Companies Can Provide Value
Shubu went over a Harvard Business Review article that he co-wrote, which was published in the November–December 2020 issue, entitled, “Is Your Marketing Organization Ready for What’s Next?” Marketing companies can provide value in one or more of six areas. Three of the areas are for the customer, and the other three are for the firm.
The three that affect the customer are:
- Exchange Value: Matching offerings to individual customer needs and context in ways that facilitate transactions
- Experience Value: Increasing convenience and enjoyment across the customer journey
- Engagement Value: Deepening and expanding the meaning and differentiation of an offering
The three that affect firms are:
- Strategic Value: Managing the data and science needed for market signals, customer insights, and resource optimization
- Operational Value: Innovating working practices, methods, and skills to improve operating effectiveness of the marketing functions
- Knowledge Value: Identifying growth paths for current offerings and guiding strategic leaps for new growth
How to Improve Marketing Capabilities
What are marketing capabilities? Shubu has a great diagram showing how having the ability to combine and transform available assets/resources in ways that deliver desired marketing outcomes connect the four pillars:
- People
- Process
- Data
- Technology
In his research, Shubu has collected data from over 500 companies. The figures show that an organization that has strong capabilities and increases their capability fit by only 1% can reap a 2.5% growth in revenue.
However, despite this incredible potential, Shubu points out that few companies have a strategic and data-driven approach to measuring and managing marketing capabilities. Without the proper metrics, how can you know whether you’re on track to that 1% improvement?
The Three Steps to Build Capabilities That Drive Growth
So how do you build those marketing capabilities? Shubu offers three simple steps:
- Map: Identify the growth capabilities managed by marketing.
- Measure: Assess the gap between current and required capability performance.
- Prioritize and Build: Focus on building a few highest impact capabilities.
Shubu offers a free survey that you can take at MarCaps.com/research that will get you a free benchmark report via email. It allows you to see how you compare to other companies and gives you a score and some priorities that you can use to plan out your business based on recommendations from MarCaps.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, the marketing industry will continue to change. The best thing that we can do for our business is to adapt and find the best capabilities and resources out there to help us grow, deliver a better customer experience, stay competitive, and make life easier for ourselves. There is no need to stay stagnant, and as Shubu points out multiple times, we need to avoid getting hyper-focused doing things the same way every time.
- Remember to map, measure, and prioritize and build.
- Create both customer value and firm value.
- Do you have the right technology and training processes in place?
Shubu was fantastic, granting a very in-depth look at not only his business but how to realize when things could be going wrong. He demonstrates how resources are a major part of staying in the game. Companies must be willing to try new things while still using classic techniques that have worked for years.
Utah DMC is thrilled to share this recap from Shubu's event, and we are happy we were able to introduce him to our audience. To understand the full context of this recap post, be sure to watch the entire replay below, which goes into much more detail than this recap post provides.
If you couldn’t make this event live, you can see the replay below. Toward the end of the presentation, there was a great Q&A session where Shubu answered viewer-submitted questions including:
- I'm in an organization where the marketing department is essentially myself. Does that make it easier or more difficult to measure organizational capabilities?
Lastly, be sure to connect with Shubu via LinkedIn or through the MarCaps website.
Explore our blog for more event recaps, and be sure to check out our DMC Online Events page to see all of our past and future digital marketing online events.
Do you have something you'd like to present to the ever-growing DMC community? If so, we'd love to speak with you. Head on over to this page, and tell us more about you and your expertise.