Modern Marketing Architecture. The Official FAPI Marketing Framework™ Guidebook: 2023 Edition

By Emiliano Giovannoni

It may sound like a cliché to say that marketing is a rapidly-changing and evolving discipline. However, changes in technology, consumer attitudes, and the regulatory environment of the last ten years have had profound implications on the industry; and to say that marketing has been revolutionized is no understatement.
The FAPI Marketing Framework™ is a sequential marketing planning and management methodology designed to guide leadership teams through the process of building and organizing high-performing marketing functions in companies of all sizes. Learn how to manage your marketing operation using the FAPI Marketing Framework™, with over thirty diagrams, real-life cases, and examples—starting from Framing your strategic marketing to creating your marketing Architecture, controlling marketing Production, and acting on Marketing Insights. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Emiliano Giovannoni
• Release date: Jan 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215791127

Emiliano Giovannoni

Emiliano Giovannoni is a seasoned digital marketing manager and consultant based in Brisbane, Australia. With vast international experience and a notable track record gained running digital marketing functions in competitive markets including the United Kingdom, Europe and Singapore, he has led digital marketing strategy for organisations ranging from publicly listed multinationals to VC-funded start-ups to drive revenue growth, deepen market-share, and foster client engagement in highly competitive market sectors including consumer finance, web and SaaS services and e-commerce retail. Emiliano is an Australian Marketing Institute Associate Fellow & Certified Practicing Marketer (AFAMI CPM)

Book preview

Preface

Bringing vision and execution together

In the hall, everyone was eagerly awaiting the CEO’s presentation. It had been a very successful year. The company had established itself as one of the leading brands in the rapidly growing and highly competitive big-data analytics Software as a Service (SaaS) sector. Staff, shareholders, and partners were excited to hear the CEO and management’s vision for the new year ahead. The CEO stood up, taking the microphone in his familiar, self-assured but pragmatic fashion, and thanked everyone for the great work and the results achieved in the year that was about to close.

There is no denying it has been a challenging year. From operational disruption due to external forces to market volatility and lingering uncertainty on the future direction of some of the company’s key markets, we have had to deal with many unforeseen events. But it’s in times like these when we understand we all have a stake in our future and can build it together.

He then proceeded to state, We have been working on a vision and direction for the new year ahead. The company has proven itself a leader in its field, and it is time for ambitious plans to drive the business to future expansion and growth. In fact, as part of our growth plans we have decided that next year we will go to the moon.

The staff and stakeholders present in the room were taken aback for a moment: What do you mean, ‘we will go to the moon’? We are a software company. We do not have the resources or know-how. We are certainly not NASA. We don’t have the budget of Elon Musk. These questions and concerns were understandable, but the CEO’s answer was as calm and self-assured as his original statement: Today we have decided that we will go to the moon. Tomorrow we will decide how we will get there.

It would be hard not to sympathize with the staff members’ surprise in this fictional scenario; the CEO’s vision did sound rather bold. In fact, I wonder if Elon Musk may have announced his SpaceX vision in a similar way, with his partners feeling similarly concerned. In any case, this software company’s CEO scenario is less far-fetched than it may sound, particularly examined from an ‘aligning business vision with execution’ perspective. The Harvard Business School found that ninety percent of businesses fail to reach their strategic goals, and the researchers believe this is due to a gap between strategic vision and tactical execution.

According to data published by Forbes, a staggering 80% of CEOs express a lack of trust in their marketing departments and are dissatisfied with the level of alignment between their business vision and marketing execution. This significant statistic highlights a pressing challenge faced by organizations today. CEOs and business leaders expect marketing strategies to effectively translate their vision into impactful campaigns and tangible results.

However, the discrepancy between expectations and reality often leads to frustration and a lack of confidence in the marketing department's ability to deliver on these objectives. It underscores the importance of bridging the gap between business goals and marketing execution, emphasizing the need for strategic alignment, clear communication, and a comprehensive understanding of the organization's vision. Addressing these concerns and establishing a trusted partnership between CEOs and marketing departments is crucial for driving growth, fostering success, and building a stronger foundation for future endeavors.

The famous Mike Tyson quote may come to mind for the more cynical among us: Everybody has a strategy until they get punched in the nose. However, the reality of missed opportunities and targets due to failed execution is all too real, and the marketing function is in the eye of the storm when it comes to delivering on a promised vision.

In the 2020 edition of this guide, I looked at the importance of, and the processes for, formulating a solid marketing plan, with a specific emphasis on the customer journey. I stressed the importance of joining the dots between the target audience’s experience and marketing preparation at a tactical level. In this revised and updated version, I will expand to draw the link between strategic and tactical marketing, including how to best manage the marketing execution process, which is where marketing success or failure is often determined. I will also look at how the marketing department can bridge the steps between understanding the vision and mission of the business (or a client) and converting them into rational, effective steps to move execution forward profitably.

Introduction

Constant learning and new challenges in a complex marketing management environment

It may sound like a cliché to say that marketing is a rapidly-changing and evolving discipline. The technical innovations of the last fifteen or twenty years have taken all industries by storm, but to say that marketing has been revolutionized is no understatement. Changes in technology, consumer attitudes, regulations, and macroeconomic trends all have profound implications for today's marketing practitioners.

For example, technical marketing areas like conversion attribution have evolved so dramatically in just a few years that it’s currently at the top of most chief marketing officers’ lists of priorities. In 2020 a Google study showed that eighty-one percent of senior marketers identify conversion attribution as their biggest challenge. Two years later, the issue is even more pressing, with Google’s imminent removal of third-party cookies creating havoc in the industry.

Experts at the FUTR’s Europe Summit highlighted how having accurate and reliable attribution data is a top challenge for marketing leaders in retail and e-commerce, and most marketing leaders struggle to see where to start. It is incredible to think conversion attribution was barely on the radar of most mid-size business marketers a little over a decade ago. I still have a copy of Perreault, McCarthy, and Pascale’s 1997 Basic Marketing. In both its first 1997 print and the 2000 edition there is no section on conversion attribution, let alone any form of analytics, which today would be unthinkable.

From digital channels to digital first

The pace of technological change is one of many issues impacting marketing, and it brings with it a series of opportunities to create conditions for significant innovation as well as the risk of potential operational chaos.

In software and IT engineering, there is the concept of ‘chaos engineering,’ which is the discipline of experimenting on a system to build confidence in its capability to withstand turbulent conditions in production. For example, in 2011 Netflix developed an internal tool cleverly named ‘Chaos Monkey’ to test the resilience of its IT infrastructure.

The tool works by intentionally disabling computers in Netflix's production network to test how the remaining systems would respond to the outage. Abstracting the idea of Netflix's chaos monkey to other areas of the business, it becomes an out-of-control entity that randomly tries to sabotage your work. How many business and marketing leaders would disagree that the rapid innovation of internet technology has played the role of a chaos monkey with their business model in the last few years?

This guide is intended to be a practical, concise resource to help managers make sense of the complex, constantly changing world of modern marketing. It is based on the perspective that marketing success requires creating a solid plan and methodically guiding its execution. Therefore, the focus of this guide is on solid planning and management as opposed to immediate execution. It is designed for business and marketing managers to use as a reference to help them shape their marketing direction with confidence.

It is also for marketing professionals, including consultants and agencies, looking for a reliable framework to rationalize and communicate their approach with internal stakeholders and clients. The profound influence of recent technological development on marketing has been remarkable that most communication about marketing implementation is now dominated by discussions about ‘tool skills’ (for example, how to create a good email drip sequence in email marketing software), bypassing the fundamental topic of ‘marketing management skills.’ This guide aims to provide a framework accessible to all marketing managers so they can develop an effective plan and guide execution without getting into a granular level of technical detail. It also provides answers and presents realistic scenarios to help business leaders make the best decisions for their companies while understanding why they are doing so.

Marketing management, a discipline in evolution

The higher the complexity of modern marketing channels and the level of sophistication of marketing techniques, the more marketing managers are forced to stretch existing resources, including specialist expertise and subject matter knowledge. Marketing agencies are not necessarily in a better position; they are caught in the squeeze between rapid change and constantly growing demands from clients. To understand the true nature of the challenge, we need to take a step back and look at the evolution of the role of marketing and digital marketing within a business structure in the last few years. In doing so, we can see that until circa 2010, digital marketing was just one of multiple tactical marketing channels, more specifically one that would gradually replace most direct marketing activities.

This evolution started in direct to consumers (D-to-C) and database marketing models, for example, in catalog or mail order sales businesses, and gradually affected the whole retail sector before impacting the business-to-business (B-to-B) marketing environment, starting from the technology sector. Marketers and business managers were reasonably comfortable with the trade-off: replacing direct mail, print advertising, the yellow pages and a part of face-to-face selling with email marketing, display ads, search engine marketing and e-commerce.  This trade-off largely maintained the same key performance indicators, which were based on lead generation or remote sales, and kept the same high-level organizational structure, so it looked like little more than a ‘skill update.’ This is essentially an infrastructure change, not a substantive change. As an analogy, This was like the changes for delivery drivers in the 1990s, who went from reading paper maps to using GPS navigation devices. For delivery drivers, this was a revolutionary improvement, but it did not fundamentally change the shape of the industry. For marketers, this was approximating a like-for-like transition.

I place the start of this transition in the early 2000s. The transition ran relatively smoothly until approximately 2010, when the Web 2.0 transition took place. In fact, during the early 2000s, in the early days of my marketing career, I executed customer-based marketing programs for a technology business using both online and offline direct marketing techniques. The marketing programs involved reaching out to a vast client database through a combination of email marketing automation, as well as traditional direct marketing channels such as bulk faxing and direct mail. This smooth transition took a drastic acceleration in the early 2010s with Web 2.0. I don't think too many people reading this guide will be too young to remember Web 2.0, but just in case, Web 2.0 was the point when four critical innovations took hold that changed the way businesses and consumers use and interact with the internet as a medium.

The first critical change was in web development, where innovation in website building technology and scripting languages made it possible for businesses of all sizes to create websites with advanced interactive functionality. These ‘dynamic’ as opposed to ‘static’ websites allowed end users to interact with them in real time. Examples of such features included messaging chats, self-assessment forms, user forums, client portals, comment boxes, and so on. Such innovation changed the nature of what it meant to provide a website experience and service. Using a website no longer meant consuming content; it now signified interacting with the content, receiving a service, and connecting with other users by sharing content. Wikipedia states that for web development, Web 2.0 refers to websites that emphasize user-generated content, ease of use, participatory culture and interoperability for end users.

Cloud computing was the second critical change of the Web 2.0 evolution. This was an infrastructure game change. In essence, cloud computing is the offering of computing services, such as servers, storage resources, databases, networking, software, analytics, and more, over the internet without direct active management by the user. To understand this in its most basic form, think of cloud computing as the shift from installing software on a local computer to running an application installed on a remote server through a browser (apologies to IT friends for the oversimplification). In practical terms, cloud computing allowed businesses and marketing departments to increase internal productivity in a way not seen for many years. It gave them access to new SaaS opportunities and channels to market. Dynamic websites and cloud computing were changes that affected both internal business operations and end-user experience with a considerable impact on the efficiency and capability of internet marketing and e-business. Two other innovations that had a seismic effect directly on the end-user that were part of the Web 2.0 shift were smartphones and social media networks.

The impact on marketing departments of dynamic websites, cloud computing, smartphones, and social media networks hitting the market all practically simultaneously and within a few years was simply explosive. There is no other way to put it.

Digital marketing went from being just one of many marketing channels to absorbing the lion's share of marketing budget allocations. It is estimated that by the mid-2010s, over seventy per cent of marketing budgets were allocated to digital marketing activities. The impact of such a shift had irreversible effects on marketing departments. The increase in digital marketing spend allocation was not simply the result of enthusiastic renewed confidence in the power of marketing given new technological frontiers, but rather it signified the redirection of resources previously allocated to other departments and traditional marketing practices into digital marketing. Functional departments with no apparent direct link to marketing saw resources shifted to digital marketing; this included functions like telemarketing, where new dynamic website functionality could absorb part of the phone-sales work, and certain cost items and capability previously allocated to IT, such as web designers or web developers, now could be seen as reporting to the digital marketing department and cost center.

By the late 2010s, the traditional marketing team was unrecognizable. Digital technology has become ubiquitous, impacting all marketing channels. All marketing activities would require some digital capability, creating a scenario where digital marketing was indiscernible from any of the marketing channels at a tactical level. Instead, digital marketing capability became the prerequisite to all marketing execution. By the end of the 2010s, it was probably no longer accurate to talk about digital (or online) and offline marketing; full convergence had been accomplished, and any discussion of online vs offline marketing was based on old habits more than real-life relevance. Of course, all industry sectors develop a shared professional jargon and a conventional set of definitions, and within the marketing profession, the term ‘digital marketing’ is still synonymous today with all tactical marketing activities that are entirely or predominantly executed using digital technology and techniques. Although this technically constitutes practically all marketing, the term is so engrained in the industry that it is still in use. This is not uncommon, as many terms, once adopted, remain in use even after their literal meaning becomes obsolete. For example, the word 'bookkeeping' came into use in the fifteenth century, when Venetian accountants invented double-entry bookkeeping and managed the process using exclusively physical books, but the term remains in use today when maintaining the financial records of a business is almost entirely digital. I expect companies will still use the term ‘digital marketing’ for a while yet.

An interesting note of folklore is how the term' digital marketing' is currently in vogue. This term was preceded by 'online marketing,' which in turn was preceded by 'web marketing' or 'internet marketing.' Of course, these are all synonyms and can be used interchangeably. Still, if anyone used the term' internet marketing' today, they would appear passé, showing a certain bias in the marketing profession to frequently present concepts and ideas as new, even if they are not entirely groundbreaking. This may seem like an insignificant quirk; however, it doesn't help streamline communication, especially between marketing and other functions or clients creating a challenge for marketing practitioners and project managers.

The importance of streamlining communication will resurface in this guide, so getting a solid grasp of terminology to use is a critical precondition to successful marketing execution. So, on the note of terminology, and given the convergence between digital marketing and marketing as a whole, I will use in this guide the terms' digital marketing' and 'modern marketing' or simply 'marketing' interchangeably. However, I will continue to make a distinction between strategy and planning (or strategy and tactics).

But back to the evolution of marketing and its digital nemesis. If by the late 2010s all marketing execution was digital, everyone knows what came after the 2010s—2020, and that’s when the restrictions brought upon by the global pandemic gave businesses and marketing departments a further push towards digital execution. At this stage, not only was marketing execution entirely digital, but business models and service delivery models became ‘digital first’ due to necessity rather than  by choice, but still generating another game-changing effect.

To illustrate what this means in real life with a practical example, I use the story of a typical yoga class business. Until the late 2010s, this type of business would be defined as a local retail business with a service-delivery model based on providing a pleasant physical retail experience through a comfortable space in a popular, attractive, accessible location with good foot traffic. The marketing efforts for new customer acquisition would be focused on word of mouth, local advertising, and personal networking. Of course, the local advertising was deployed using some online platforms such as classifieds networks like Gumtree and maybe a website, but it didn't need to be very sophisticated; the process simply led the potential customer ringing or emailing the studio to find out more or visit the health club in person.

By the end of 2020, the local yoga class business started provisioning online yoga tuition via webcam and turned its marketing and business model from a local retail company into a national (and in some cases, global) database-marketing company focusing its marketing not on local advertising but on conversion optimization, programmatic media buying and social-media content marketing for new customer acquisition. It now relied not on a pleasant physical retail experience for service delivery but on low latency, video live streaming platforms and credit card payment capability.

The local yoga studio is merely an example, but it is an example of the dynamic that played out across multiple sectors. In businesses of all sizes, the knowledge center for much of the capability required to make this digital transition resided within the digital marketing function (internal or outsourced). This shift resulted in yet another push for diversion of resources and responsibility to digital marketing, changing once more the position and significance of digital marketing for companies of all sizes. As a result, by the end of 2020 most business models became ‘digital first’ (or at least strived to), and the digital marketing function also enabled this process to take place in non-marketing functions, as illustrated in the diagram below (Figure 1.0 Evolution of digital marketing). The diagram illustrates how digital marketing is no longer merely a tactical marketing execution channel but an enabler of all marketing as well as a facilitator of digital transformation processes within the business.

Figure 1.0 Evolution of digital marketing

An operational example of the shift of a traditionally non-marketing function to the digital marketing team is the use of social media to listen for customer satisfaction sentiment. Most digital marketing teams have access to social media listening software as part of any standard social media management package like Sprinklr or Hootsuite. This functionality is used by digital marketing teams to monitor user sentiment and conversation around a specific product, brand, or topic and respond or participate in the discussion. This is an example of a task that only a few years ago would have been thought of as the responsibility of the customer service department. But with the technology and know-how existing within the digital marketing departments, previously non-marketing tasks like this have become part of the digital marketing team’s responsibilities.

Digital marketing as a center of excellence and business enabler

This means digital marketing nowadays is a strategic component of a business and not a tactical go-to-market activity. The digital capability of a company defines its business model, but such expansion brings along challenges through increased organizational complexity, including cross-functional blurred lines, larger budgets through investment in media and software, and teams requiring senior marketing management leaders who are technically competent and marketing savvy. To this effect, it's not unusual to see new and creative job titles in job sites for what used to be marketing management roles: Chief Marketing Technologist, Digital Director, Digital Optimization Director. This signals how the industry is responding to the new dynamics at play.

The evolution of the digital marketing role has been reactive rather than built on gradual and solid foundations. Out of necessity it has put more responsibility and a broader scope on a sector - marketing - that already suffered from lack of clarity and consistency. Some consolidation is due in the sector and will probably happen in the coming years. Anyone working in marketing would agree that the sector didn’t need the added complexity and confusion caused by the expansion of digital marketing. Data reported by Business Insider shows that only a third of CEOs trust their marketing chiefs to grow their business, combined with a report by the Harvard Business Review showing that Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) have the highest turnover in the C-suite, staying in office only 4.1 years on average, which is approximately half the duration of any other C-suite role.

An old saying can be paraphrased roughly as, 'New ways and ideas do not come into being by defeating the old ones in a popularity contest or because their proponents convince people to change, but rather they come into being because the old ways and ideas die out.' To this end, digital marketing is filling a vacuum in businesses, a knowledge and skill gap that sits in the middle of multiple disciplines. However, it's fair to say that the previous set-up of the marketing department was not entirely satisfactory to businesses.

Today's companies grapple with the following question: If all customer interaction with the company happens through digital devices and internet technology, then how are responsibilities and competencies best reorganized? There is a need for a paradigm shift in how businesses look at the marketing function. The change must stem from within the marketing industry through education and training. While the upheaval in marketing runs its natural course, I will try to contribute with this guide to help rationalize the process of constructing a robust marketing plan and management structure that can consider all facets of this new hybrid discipline.

Regardless of the pace of technological innovation, the marketing leadership team must ensure that strategy and planning remain rooted in solid marketing foundations. This requires aligning the evolving responsibilities with the core principles of marketing, ensuring a seamless integration of digital strategies, customer engagement, data analysis, and overall business objectives. By embracing this holistic approach, companies can effectively navigate the changing landscape and optimize their marketing efforts for long-term