Mayur Gupta on marketing as a growth engine

The array of digital devices and platforms continues to grow in strength and numbers, causing considerable anxiety among brands and advertisers. In an environment that tips the balance of power to consumers, how is marketing able to keep pace?

In his keynote at Acceleration 2019, Freshly CMO Mayur Gupta said brands can thrive in a consumer-driven world by re-positioning marketing as a growth engine, one that is adaptable and in sync with the preferences and needs of consumers. By shifting focus from one-off campaigns, brands can create an always-on marketing machine that produces results on an ongoing basis leading to better marketing ROI and freeing marketing teams to develop new ideas rather than racing to create and deploy singular campaigns.

The basic components of marketing include growing the brand, growing the user base, and growing the user value. Each element must serve a different function for the marketer, but all three pillars must occur consistently and intersect with one another.

The key is creating a strong foundation for growing the brand and user base that not only helps retain users, but also adds value to their customer experience.

Marketers are too often concerned with developing campaigns and not focused enough on measurable outcomes. To ensure accountability, Gupta believes brands must define a set of users and consumers that fit the brand’s purposes of marketing: creating demand through education and awareness, employing science and performance marketing to capture demand, and retaining the demand.

According to Gupta, the growth engine model consists of five key principles. First and foremost, brands must establish the purpose and mission of marketing by setting clear KPIs that match the demand outcomes. While not to de-emphasize the need to hire talented people, Gupta stressed the importance of quantifying and defining what a brand’s campaign is going to do in terms of its actual impact.

Gupta cited a statistic that 80% of marketing spend should be maximized on 100% of business outcomes. At the same time, not all marketing decisions need to be calculated; successful marketing requires that marketers leverage creativity, emotion, and humanity as much as they do data.

In accordance with that philosophy, marketers need to have an understanding of the causality of human behaviors by always thinking about the answers for the “why” behind the “what” of marketing campaigns and engagements.

The final piece of the marketing growth engine, said Gupta, is for brands to use data and science to determine predictive behavior, gaining foresight into what consumers need. In the process, brands are empowered with market intelligence to add consistent value to each phase of the consumer lifecycle.

Still, even the most data-driven or textbook approach to marketing will not ensure a successful campaign. In such a competitive and constantly evolving marketplace, Gupta insisted the only way to measure future marketing success with consumers is for brands to examine previous marketing failures.

Despite the possibility of failures along the way, brands need to use experimentation, from both a creative and mathematical perspective, in constructing a marketing engine that serves the individual needs of each brand. It’s only by putting in the time and effort into developing a marketing strategy that leads to an always-on marketing engine that consumer-facing brands can thrive, while allowing their marketing teams to flex their creative muscle through additional innovative initiatives.