Proving marketing’s value - Aligning sales, marketing and leadership

Proving value is one of the trickiest things to do in marketing. In this episode of the CIM Marketing Podcast, host Ben Walker talks to Charlotte Johnson, founder of Marketeer Moments, whose mission is to reinvent faith in marketing. 

Charlotte explains why marketers often struggle to earn credibility inside their own organisations: they speak a language that finance, sales, and commercial leaders don't share. She offers advice to listeners on how to practically fix this issue and repair the bridge between marketing and the rest of the business. 

Charlotte also looks back on her time as head of marketing at Alexandra Palace, where she turned around a 140-year-old heritage brand by respecting its identity as 'the People's Palace'. 

If you want to know how to prove your marketing ROI to your CFO, start listening now.

Want to know more? Check out the CIM Content hub now for all things marketing.
 

Thanks for listening to this episode. You can share your thoughts and feedback in our survey now, or contact us at [e-mail]

Creators and Guests

Host

Ben Walker

Host, CIM Marketing Podcast

Guest

Charlotte Johnson

Founder, Marketeer Moments

What is CIM Marketing Podcast?

The official podcast of The Chartered Institute of Marketing.

We spotlight actionable strategies, highlight best practices, and source expert opinions to help you elevate your marketing game. Whether you're focused on digital marketing, content creation, SEO, strategy, or something else entirely, we’ve got you covered.

Get the latest news, trends, and insights from across the industry. Hosted by Ben Walker, this podcast offers accessible, relevant discussions on the big issues impacting marketing today.

This podcast is your essential resource for staying ahead of the curve.

Ben Walker 0:00
What gives you your first inkling that you that things are starting to turn your way when you're changing the relationship between marketing, sales, and leadership?

Charlotte Johnson 0:10
It's just it's a feeling in the room, really, but it will be something like a discussion around quality of lead, or be a discussion around dropout between put a product into basket to check out, and someone not in that direct team gives an idea of how it would help, and they respect each other enough to listen and be like, "Oh, that was a good idea. What if we do this? And we haven't even spoken, we haven't coached through it, we haven't mentored through it, we haven't gone or what are the alternatives? Like the ideas are just flowing, and that would have never have happened like six months ago.

Ben Walker 1:00
Hello, everybody, and welcome to the CIM Marketing Podcast. And you know, today we are going to be discussing that trickiest of things in our industry: value, how to prove it, how to prove it to the business and the wider world. And to discuss this, we've got a great guest with us today. None of them is Charlotte Johnson, and Charlotte is founder of Marketeer Moments. She is on a mission. I think it's fair to say to reinvent faith in marketing and bridge that gap between marketing and sales, and prove our worth as marketers. She works with brands, and some of you might not like this initially, but I'm sure she can explain. She works with brands to bring all marketing in-house with a three-year programme that delivers the team, the systems, and the automations to drive business growth. How are you doing, Charlotte? Great to have you on

Charlotte Johnson 1:53
the show. Thanks for having me. Really good to be here.

Ben Walker 1:56
I was being a bit provocative there. You can tell us a little bit about this mission. People on agency side will be thinking she's trying to destroy all agencies.

Charlotte Johnson 2:04
Well, it might, and it might not. I think it's every business and every stage has different elements of what they need, and there is a big trend on moving things in house. But that probably wouldn't be the biggest thing that's impacted us. AI has probably impacted us more than more than that, and I think there's a big trend and a need for in-house teams to have better training and in-house teams to be the ability to be able to have those services in-house. I think the agency model has shifted a lot in the last five six years, but it's about to really shift again. I think where this model came in. So I have an agency, a couple of agencies. I've worked in house. I built marketing moments originally as an events and training programme for in house marketeers. And as I met hundreds and hundreds of members at our events, we did roundtables. We had big, like every quarter, there was a big talking event, but what came out of that was this constant fear and feeling very insecure in their roles. Very often, you've got one or two people in marketing. If it's a sort of SME, if it's much bigger, then you've got much bigger teams. But we had both size teams, and they were all feeling the same way. They're under pressure to deliver more, especially around performance, but no one ever taught them how to do it, and they were constantly having to manage agencies and manage budgets. But when you ask the question, "Who taught you how to create a marketing budget in targets? No one knew how to do it, and we said, "When you look at a scorecard and you analyse your performance, do you understand why that number is that number? Like no, because no one ever talks about it, and there's just this constant backlog. So the more we had these conversations, the more it became so clear that marketing members just needed to be a programme that taught them to do these things and allowed them to build systems and processes and automations that meant they didn't need external services again.

Ben Walker 4:01
People will listen to that and think, yeah, they'll recognise a lot in what you've said. You know, people dropped into the deep end. They're never told why things are the way they are, what the point of them is. They just have to do them. They will still look at it and say, this lady is basically wants all her own clients to leave. I mean, what sort of a business model is that? You, you are you are a business that wants your clients to eventually leave you.

Charlotte Johnson 4:25
Well, leave maybe isn't the word, but graduate, so they don't need us. We still go back in quarterly. We still do strategy with them. People leave, so we still have to do training with new teams. Technology changes, so they still need that support, but just not in the same level. So with us, every year that someone works with us, the price goes down, and they do more and we do less, and then that allows us to bring on more clients. And with any agency model or any service case, when you have fixed overhead, you have to really deliver on service. You have a fixed amount of clients you can actively. Have for us the sweet spot is around 15 to 20. Otherwise, we have to have a whole new pod, and every time we go up to that pod, it doesn't quite work, and it's you know vice versa. But you have a limited time, and if you have a client, some of our clients on the agency stayed with us for over seven years. We didn't have a retention problem, but that also didn't. It doesn't fit the mission and the ethos, if we want to reinvent faith in marketing, you can't do that by just delivering. You have to teach. And if you want to reinvent faith in the industry and change its perception, you need to do it in a way that disrupts it and do it in a way that actually serves people that doesn't just serve us as like what makes us the most profit. This model is still profitable, but it doesn't have to be greedy.

Ben Walker 5:41
It's interesting, isn't it? I mean, you use this. It's a powerful phrase: reinvent faith in marketing, and it's powerful for one key reason, because the premise of that that phrase means that you think that faith has been, to some degree or less, lost in marketing. Why do you think it's been lost?

Charlotte Johnson 5:57
I, you know, I don't even know if it was ever there because I used to play around with this and this this line of like, I actually started was I think it was re. I wasn't re it wasn't reinvent. It started as like rebuild or I'll reinstate. I think it was originally. I think it was to reinstate faith and a mentor really challenged me that like if you really want to do this and my natural stance is like innovation and disruption. I'm the happiest when I'm innovating and disrupting for the better. It's just part of my ethos and values, I suppose. And she was challenging me. She was not, but the way you talk, you don't doesn't sound like you ever think people really did truly work like trust marketing, or was it even that good? I thought that's a really good question. Actually, no, it's about reinventing because one, we're always having to reinvent and pivot. What worked for us a year ago will not work anymore. What worked for us when we were being taught how to do marketing no longer even exists, and depending on how long you do it. So, like now, doing it 25 years, someone just coming into the industry is on the same playing field level as me because the technology is there to help them. Fine, they may not have the experience, but if you're clever enough and the ability to prompt and figure things out, you could operate new enough at the same level as me. And I just don't shy away from that or think that isn't true. I think let's jump into that and see what like the next opportunity is, which is why the programme was created.

Ben Walker 7:22
There's a lack of faith in marketing. It needs to be rebuilt. We part of that, and a big central plank of it is to be able to prove our value to other people in our business,

Speaker 1 7:34
yeah,

Ben Walker 7:34
and people outside of our business. We'll start with the first one. We'll dig into the external stuff, perhaps a little bit later on, but internally, you think that we're not great at proving our value, and we need to massively improve.

Charlotte Johnson 7:48
I think marketeers are with other marketeers because they speak our language. So when we talk to marketeers, we all big each other up and say, "Oh, that's awesome! How did you do that? But outside of our own little bubble and our lingo, most people don't understand it. It needs to be rewritten and use different language. Marketing and sales are often at loggerheads because they don't respect each other and they're not in enough of the same meetings. And leadership-if you're lucky enough to have someone in your leadership team that is a marketeer-they'd probably have your back a little bit more. But most often, they're not. They're usually finance-based. They're usually commercial leaders, or they're the founder or like an owner manager. Like that's your general leadership base. They all speak very different languages. They have different agendas, and they respect things differently. So when you report and when you feedback on what marketing does, like my reporting style changes dramatically depending on who I'm talking to. So when I write a report, if I know it's going to group, I will think about each seat and each person that that report is going to. But have I answered all of their questions? This isn't about what I want to say about the campaign I've done. Have I answered their questions and have I written it in a way that they understand, whether I like it or not, but that is the way that my reports always used to get through, and I would all be able to get the money and funding I needed to because I presented them in a way that they respected.

Ben Walker 9:12
We're going to dig into this a little bit more, but I'm just going to go back to what you said earlier. You said about marketing and sales, the people who bring in the money versus the people who create the platform to bring in the money, or at loggerheads most of the time. In your experience, they're not. They don't have a shared experience. They're rarely in the same meetings. They don't speak the same language. You've talked a lot about about bridging that gap. What's the secret? Is it just spending more time with them, or is there more to it?

Charlotte Johnson 9:42
It really starts at leadership. The leadership it can't just be the consultants or people that coming in. Leadership have to really want them to be together, bringing them into ideally the same physical space, the same meetings, and like targeting them and incentivizing them in the same way. Like the best kind. Companies I've seen where they've made that shift. So, like, we had a client that was able to. We started with we do it for you. Then we went to do it together. Then to do it yourselves, and they graduated in two years. This programme, they had one marketeer to start with. They now have a team of seven, and in that two-year period, the difference was sales and marketing was in the same meeting. Sales and marketing was incentivized in the same way. So, if a closer gets a percentage of the deal from closing, the lead generator should get a percentage of that deal too. Very often, marketeers are not incentivized like salespeople are. So, they think, why should we bother? But also, leadership don't often target marketeers like salespeople. There is an there is a physical outcome that salesperson has to deliver, and it's very clear you've either delivered it or you're not. You either hit your target or you don't hit your target. You're either getting your bonus and commission or you're not. Marketing don't have it. It's fluffier. Therefore, the outcome that they're producing is fluffier. That's just why they don't get the respect, because if you've said okay, as a sales team, as a marketing team, there are generally three or four things every business will need. You either need sales, you need leads, you need a donation if it's a charity, you need ticket sales, or you might need event signups. Last one might be data collection if they're not in if they're not really commercially savvy, but they're the six things that a marketer has to deliver. And if the business is clear, okay, we are a online business. We need to deliver this many things into basket, or we need this many checkouts. You are responsible for delivering the outcome. If it's B 2b, need to deliver this many leads, then you can say number of leads, number of quality leads, number of converted leads. If you're targeted on an outcome and it's very clear what you have to deliver, and you build backwards and report backwards, the language you're using, the reporting you're giving, the outcomes you are delivering as a marketer are so much stronger, and you're talking a language that leadership understands as well as sales. Now, if sales and marketing are in the same meeting and they're talking about, okay, yes, but the impact of that quality lead is this, this, and this. What would you change? Sales find it really hard to answer, and there's a and all of a sudden there's a there's a difference in respect of okay, I understand how difficult it is for you to close, but you also understand how difficult it is for me to get get the quality lead over volume of lead because of the the different levers I can tweak during this funnel. When sales actually can visualise what the funnel is like before they get to that point, so let's say at the point it lands in the CRM, then sales take over. I mean, even that most companies can't answer when does that end and when does that start, which is where loggerheads become. And if you can then work backwards and say, okay, well, actually, the the biggest dropout in our data is from here to here. We're going to fix that part of our funnel. There is a shift in we're in it together and we are a team of teams that understand what each other's doing. But when that happens in a business, it can really catapult it.

Ben Walker 13:06
It's fascinating, isn't it? Because what you're really talking about here is you're talking about creating a common language between marketing, sales, and leadership, which, in your experience, has been lacking in lots of businesses. You've seen, you've observed there isn't a common language to some degree, in extreme cases, perhaps you see that people are speaking foreign languages to each other. Therefore,

Charlotte Johnson 13:26
you can have the word, but what does the word mean? What's the criteria of that word? What defines done and not done? And is everyone aware of it? What does lead mean? What's its criteria? And when is it an actual lead? Everyone's version of that will be different. Like if that is nailed down and supported by a tech stack that actually talks to each other, then half of the battle is won.

Ben Walker 13:49
So it's even worse than having a foreign language. Where at least with a foreign language, you know it's different. What you're saying is it's a common language with different meanings between different departments, and that just causes ongoing confusion between separate departments in the business. For marketing directors listening to this and wants to start sort of changing the narrative about the department's value, starting tomorrow, what's the single most effective thing they can do to sort of get some of the things that you're suggesting here up and running and still in the business?

Charlotte Johnson 14:18
Clarity is kindness, but you need, as the directors or as leaderships, they have to create what is what is the outcome. So I often always say work in a 90 day world. So over we're going now into what is our q3. For others, it might be q4. But as of the first of October, for those 90 days until the end of that calendar year, what do we actually need to achieve? Not all of the other fluffy stuff around it, the projects, everything else. What is the goals? Going back to that, is it sales? Is it leads? Is it data capture? Is it event signups? Is it donations? Whatever. How many do we actually need? People don't know that because they don't have targets. Okay. What is the overall target we need to get for the year? How far are we year to date? What's the gap? Or work backwards. What did we achieve in the last quarter? What would happen if we increase by 5% Like if they're just an incremental gain, draw out the funnel and the journey that needs to get there. So from the sell or from the lead, what are the touch points? How are those assets performing? Who is responsible for what part of each funnel? Okay, you as marketing, you as sales, you as closer, you as social team, you as this. If everyone is feeding into this mishmash and no one has like a responsibility of like each line, you can't guarantee the outcome. You can't be responsible for it. So even like when we go in and we have and we're doing the delivery, and so if you want me to be responsible for those leads or those sales, I have to have full control over the funnel. I can't have one team doing it here, one part doing it here. I need to be able to make these changes really quickly. So it's it's really about setting the right goals, working backwards in a journey, and allocating like you as a social team, are responsible for this strand of the funnel, which needs to reach this many people, engage this many people, get this many people to this part of the site. Like those are your three measures, and you need to be accountable for them, and come back with your plan of how you're going to do it.

Ben Walker 16:18
Do you think that most businesses get this in their heart, or do you think a lot of this teaching will come as completely new to them? As in, what I mean by that is, do do you think that people recognise there's a problem with credibility and communication between departments, but don't know how to change it, or do you think that some people don't simply recognise it first at all.

Charlotte Johnson 16:42
I think it's recognised, but it's recognised in more moaning, and the problem is it's just accepted, right? So there's the moan of, and hundreds of marketers we've spoken to at our events. Come on, then, what's happening? You know, let it out and get their rents out. And we would coach through it, and we'd be like, "Yeah, I totally. You have really get. You have really experienced that, and yeah, sales just don't get it. And you know, the CFOs are a nightmare. They don't get it unless you just say return on investment list. I said, but what if it wasn't them? What if it was us, and it was the way we're reporting? I was like, give me an example of a number, or they they gave me a scenario of what was happening with their CFO, and I said, okay, I'm going to make up the numbers here, but I'm going to rewrite the report you've just given me. I'm going to say it like this: How do you think that landed? And I'd be like, oh, okay, yeah, I get it. So there's it's accepted because it's just like, oh, you know, sales and marketing just never get on, isn't it? Or is there is there a better way? So there's the education piece. There's they don't always know, and and I suppose this is what inspired the programme. is It's really cool, and we go in and these teens are all at loggerheads, and within about six months they're starting to run their own meetings and following their weekly system and coming up with the ideas of like why a number is off track together, the language has changed, the respect has changed, and everyone starts to go, oh okay, yeah, no, there's there's a better way. I think it's such a cool thing to see. It's probably why I do sound a bit crazy by having our clients graduate and not needing us anymore, but it's also awesome, and it's so much better than the old client agency back and forth scope creep dance. Like that was just awful way. I mean, it's we haven't done that for a long time. But when I was coming up in agencies, like that's all that happened. It was all just defensive. It was a constant stream of oh, well, that's out of scope. Oh, we can't be responsible for that number. That was just utter rubbish. And when started the agency model, even that seven eight years ago was fixed monthly pricing for an outcome or a result, and we guaranteed the results.

Ben Walker 18:54
It's amazing. You're getting your clients ready effectively to fly the nest, and you you could you start you start with long. I love this phrase, but I love this this word loggerheads. You start with loggerheads, and after about six months, you you see harmony to the point where people are doing it for themselves, organising their own meetings, talking the same language.

Charlotte Johnson 19:13
Yeah, and it also really depends who's brought us in. So if like the commercial directors brought us in, they're like, oh god, what is this? If the marketing team has brought us in. We've got a different sales pitch to do, and if leadership's brought us in, then we have to do one times with the teams before we even get going on getting the the group together.

Ben Walker 19:30
When do you realise that you've had your first success? So between that point, day zero and six months, what gives you your first inkling that you that things are starting to turn your way when you're changing the relationship between marketing, sales, and leadership.

Charlotte Johnson 19:47
It's just it's a feeling in the room, really. But it will be something like a discussion around quality of lead, or be a discussion around dropout between per. Product into basket to check out, and someone not in that direct team gives an idea of how it would help, and they respect each other enough to listen and be like, "Oh, that was a good idea. What if we do this? And we haven't even spoken, we haven't coached through it, we haven't mentored through it, we haven't gone. Or what are the alternatives? Like the ideas are just flowing, and that would have never have happened like six months ago.

Ben Walker 20:25
Interesting. Let's talk about entrepreneurialism in marketing, which is another thing that's close to your heart. Marketers often want to make a case for investment or make a case for a new project in their business, whereas other departments, sales, you know, C-suite leadership, so on and so forth, can be more focused on what could be cut-term short-term exploitation of their current business. So you know, increasing revenues on their current products, increasing sales on their current products, rather than branching out into new space or new playing field or whatnot. It's something that comes to most marketeers when they get to their sort of middle ranks and further in their career, where they think, you know, what this is a real opportunity for us as a business. We want to make a case for it. We want to be sort of the entrepreneurial department, and they come a they do often come up against these sort of short term barriers or resistance from the department. What advice would you give to those sort of marchers who are in that position, who who see an opportunity, see a venture that they think would work, and need to be able to make that case to the rest of the business?

Charlotte Johnson 21:35
Yes, it's it's a really different one because you've got most other com well, most other departments are either income generating or money saving, or delivering, which I have to prove it. And marketing is always seen as an overhead. I think one of the best things you can do is get it to be seen as what the marketing's P and L is, and look at what you deliver in income as well as what you deliver in iPads, and whenever I used to have to pitch to get extra funding, I would review the year. Like we spent this much, we brought in this much, and this is what I think by doing this extra investment, whatever it is, that would what I deliver. Remind them of the cases of what we've done before and how we have already brought in revenue. So this isn't a fluffy thing that I've waived. I put detailed thinking in that business case of okay, if I think I'm getting an ROI of four, how what is the actual workings out? So as an example, like if we want to do a 20k extra media budget on something, and it's all to do with getting other subscriptions in. Well, okay, what is the conservative average deal size of that subscription? How long, on average, does that customer stay for? What's our value over that time? Then, how many of those would I need to get based on a standard conversion rate? How many do we need on the site? How many do we need in the engagement? How many do we need on the reach? Worked out all the calculations backwards to be done, and this is why I need this figure to get that many people at that conversion rate, and prove why that is a conservative conversion rate, not a fluffy one. And put all of that into a business case before I present it, and then I'd cut it up very differently depending on who it goes to, so that last piece about that, that would be page one for the CFO, but it will be page nine for the marketing director, and it will just be a very, very different way of like reporting

Ben Walker 23:33
it. Do you think that the entrepreneurial mindset is there for most marketers, or or it's there, but it's sort of crushed by the fear of doing the sorts of things that you've said-that you know, I've got an idea, but I don't really know how to communicate this idea.

Charlotte Johnson 23:47
Fear is a big thing. It's often crushed by fear. There's a lack of experience, or there's a lack of conversation. Marketers don't talk like this enough. It is about conversion rates and the dropout of the waterfall and how people work through that funnel, and once that data is there and leadership and others see, oh, that's how it's been worked out. It's never a problem. If you just go with that and there's no numbers backing it up, you know, it's like going to a bank asking for a loan and giving no idea of how it's going to be repaid. You wouldn't do it, or you have to always prove there's my payslips, or this is you know this is what happens, and it's the same thing when asking for marketing budget. The alternative is look at your marketing budget and say, hey, actually I want to use this 20k in a different way. I'm making savings here. I would like to use this here, but I wanted to only use the first 5k of it in a test and learn pilot. We're going to do a 12-week test and learn. We're going to optimise that on a daily basis to get the best possible return on investment. Then, once we show it's working, we want to use the next 15 to do this. There's not probably enough business cases that go up. Right, I'm going to do a test and learn. We're going to learn from the data, and then we're going to represent it to you.

Ben Walker 25:06
Interesting. Let's talk about where you got these amazing learnings from. You've got an interesting background. You're head of marketing at Alexandra Palace, no less, the venue that many people will be familiar with. This is the events venue. If you don't know, is at the top of a audience in London terms a giant hill. It hosts all sorts of events, famously at Christmas, the Darts World Championship, but hosts events year round. It's very much a heritage brand. You know, it's been there for years. You know, I'm sure it has many sort of traditional structures in place and of ways of doing things, but you're an innovator. You're you're you're a troubleshooter, an innovator, someone who comes in and sees problems with organisations and and fixes them. Tell me about how you did that at Alexandra Palace. It was an interesting sort of balancing a heritage brand with this sort of innovative verve that you bring to your companies that you work with. I

Charlotte Johnson 26:05
think Alipay probably was one of the biggest learning grounds in my career, and it's with a heritage brand. It's not really a job or a brand you change. You've got to like truly respect it and love it and understand its heritage before you touch it. And I think that's what happens. And everyone that works there, and everyone that's you know carried on with it, it's incredible journey. It doesn't really work there. They're part of a a family, and I suppose a movement that got to really shape this, not just its heritage of where it is going, but all of the people that got to experience it for the 140 years before we even started there, and it's very unique. But when you work there, you have a commercial board and you have a public sector board, and both run uniquely. That's an incredible experience to have because now a lot of our public sector clients that we work with know that we truly understand their language and the difficulties they have to. They have to go through. It was a privilege, really, because this 140 year old brand had not been touched when we started 2007, and back then, no promoter wanted to put an event on there. It wasn't cool. It wasn't fun. We did not have the funds to do anything with the building; it needed a lot of work. So all we actually had was brand and marketing to start the journey of turning it around. Later on, we then got heritage lottery funding reopened the theatre, was able to bring back the fireworks, was able to bring back a lot of the outside events as well as the incredible amount of gigs and heritage events that happen, but as a brand, you would juggle in an organ, an organ society, wildlife conservation areas, an ice rink, outdoor golf course, 196 acres of public park, seven acres over four floors, 10 different individual venues as well as interconnecting venues, all the food and beverage, but it was a very, very unique place to be as an in-house team because we very quickly was like, right, we need to build an in-house agency. So anywhere this is going to work, because we have 25 internal clients and we need to balance all of them. And if we don't keep on side the heritage,

Ben Walker 28:16
but these are these are the different business internal businesses, the golf course, the K 20, etc. etc. Yeah, and

Charlotte Johnson 28:21
some of them franchisees. Some of them are run by Arrogate Council. Some of them are run by the trading arm that is the organisation. So internal politics and internal things. I learnt very quickly. Like how do you manage that and build it in a way that is hearts and minds first with the brand, and build it all together. And even at one point when we redesigning a website, we had to have multiple tiles in a gallery because I had to give equal amount to the conservation area to Florence and the machines. And once we had Arctic Monkeys and the Organ Society in the same banner, you're like, "What? How on earth does that work? And in a normal brand, you'd like that would never work, but interestingly, when we started being able to do our own ticketing sales, our ticket, our email data, and our conversion rates were just as strong about talking about multiple elements of the brand, not just the cool stuff. And actually, our audience was an eclectic, interesting. Like they were interested in everything we did. It wasn't just about one thing. And then the the respect of the heritage brand. I mean, you just have to truly love it. This was a very very unique brand, and rather than just focusing on the cool stuff, it was taking it back to its original roots. So it was pulling out the AP that was already in the building. It's very much part of the railings around it, so there was no point to change it. We didn't need to. What we did was we had to change the tone. So it always was and always will be your Ali Pali. It's the People's Palace, and it wasn't a royal palace. It was gritty. It parts of it falling down. It and it's. Has that edge, and that's what we needed to play on, because that's all we had to get the core promoters in and to turn it around as a place that you wanted to visit. We had to make it cool online, but we also had to respect its heritage. So it was keeping that old style and your Ali Pally as all the socials, rather than maybe going down a, and many people pitched for it, but a more modern route.

Ben Walker 30:26
It's an it's interesting. It's an emotional element there, isn't there? The sort of winning the hearts of minds or keeping the hearts and minds on board with such a

Speaker 2 30:32
yeah because we're

Ben Walker 30:33
at that.

Charlotte Johnson 30:34
We're just the custodians of it at that point. Like everyone that's been there for 150 years, everyone that got to experience it, every wedding that happened there, every engagement that happened there, every unique moment at a gig or the first ever rave that was there when television started-like everyone got to experience those moments-and they all have their stories, and it was always their ally, pali, because they got to share it, and it also allowed everyone to play on it. Whether you've never been or it's your first time, or your mum used to work there. Like you, everyone's got their story, and very simple line was able to connect millions of people in like the same sentiment.

Ben Walker 31:11
So, how do you empower that culture? How do you transfer that to other businesses? That ability to sort of empower people to take risks and innovate while preserving the essence of the business that they're working in, you know, it's a hard balance for marketeers to strike. I think at times.

Charlotte Johnson 31:27
No, it is, and it takes a lot of time and energy. Takes a lot of passion in the presentation. I think with every presentation and every update, internally or externally, reminding people of the purpose and the outcome. What are we all trying to achieve here? And always bringing it back to the brand foundations. I'm big on performance marketing, but I don't touch performance marketing until I know those brand foundations are strong. And even when clients ask to work with us and be like, "Oh yeah, I just want you to come in and you know get us leads, we're like, "Yes, but I need to challenge brand foundations first. Otherwise, we're not going to do that because we're not connecting with anyone anywhere. If your brand foundations are wobbly,

Ben Walker 32:07
interesting. We always ask this of our guests, so I hope you've got an interesting answer, or one that one that certainly you know excites you. Is that a favourite moment from your career or from a campaign that you've worked on

Charlotte Johnson 32:21
so many. It probably is still Alipay. So back in 2012, before we before the Olympics had got to London, we had been pitching for took 13 months actually. We've been pitching for Hollandarican House at the Palace. So every country, whenever you come over to any Olympics. The each country hosts its house, and Holland is the is the biggest one. And we'd been pitching for months and months to try and get it. We'd won it. It was just before the start of the Olympics, and we were at the cusp of turning the the build the building around because we'd just started to get promoters wanting to come in. I think Florence decided to do three nights at Ali Padio over, going to one of the stadiums, and it was the starting of this. Everything we've done for the last three to four years is finally paying off, and everyone can see it. And the the energy was just we were at that tipping point, and when it tipped, it it really went.

Ben Walker 33:17
Interesting, that was amazing. Um, people listening to the show. I think this lady's cracked a lot of the problems that I've found in my business. I can see my business reflected in some of the examples she's given, and may help them sort of you know improve that relationship between departments that we've we spoke about earlier, and to improve that communication and create that sort of common language that will help us understand our colleagues better and make the case to the business of the value of marketing. But it was a critique of the sector, so I'm going to turn it on for my final question on the head: Is what makes you optimistic about the marketing business, the future. What what sort of makes warms your heart about the future of our industry?

Charlotte Johnson 34:06
The people that are in it are, while we all moan about different things, are super passionate, inquisitive, and I think some of the creative and creative campaigns I see now are extraordinary, and even in like the most simplistic creative that we're seeing coming out is still really strong. And despite having these dark clouds looming over of like, oh, AI is changing everything, and AI is is taking our jobs, most of the conversations I see they're like, if not, it's just the next big tool. Like when socials happened, it's going to change the playground. But we're still, it's just the toys that have changed. So the thing that excites me the most is the passion that is still there within teams. So even when we're talking about the AI revolution, all the things that are happening, we're moaning about the loggerheads, all the. These things that members have been talking about for a long time, the second we let the rants out, the passion that is there and the ideas that are coming through and the creative that comes through is still incredible. I think marketers are held back quite a bit because of the lack of systems and processes in in their businesses, but the ones that once they fix that and they get these programmes in the quality of that marketing and the quality of the ideas coming through is still super inspiring.

Ben Walker 35:27
So the brains are there, the structures aren't quite there, but with the right steps, we can improve it and we can get that common language and really meet our potential as an industry.

Charlotte Johnson 35:37
Yeah, for sure.

Ben Walker 35:38
That's Charlotte Johnson, founder of Marketeer Moment. Thank you very much indeed, Charlotte, for your time and insights.

Charlotte Johnson 35:44
Yes, thanks for having me.

Ben Walker 35:53
We are back every fortnight with a new edition, so keep tuning in every two weeks to find a new episode of the podcast with great guests from across the industry. Finally, thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed the episode, and we'll see you in a couple of weeks for the next episode of the CIM Marketing Podcast. The

Karen Barnett 36:10
contents and views expressed by individuals in this podcast are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of the Chartered Institute of Marketing or the companies they work for.