Valeria Maltoni, a smart marketer who gets it, recently penned a post called How Big Brands can Start Testing Social Media. The sentences that carry the most cache for me are these: “You probably read it in many of my posts – we’re tired of being sold to, but we do like to buy. It’s the push/pull tension. Social media, when executed well, is perfect for what marketers term inbound.”
I commented:
“I have been screaming to the hills with very few echoes returned: In today’s world, we marketers should be placing most of our efforts and our budgets on Inbound Marketing. But first we need to fix corporate cultures.
“According to just-released CMO Council data, “83 percent of marketers say they face change-resistant corporate cultures, conflicts and competition between internal constituencies, and a resistance to operational accountability, visibility and measurement.” And that is a problem.
“Until alignment of customer touchpoints and accountability plus measurement become top priorities, no strategies or tools will be effective or efficient. Keep up the great thinking Valeria.”
And that’s the bottom line. It doesn’t really matter how we approach marketing. Until we align the data, analyze it and use it to predict consumer behavior, Inbound Marketing can only deliver mediocre results. Apparently, those of us criticizing CMOs for not getting it owe 83 percent of them an apology. They do get it. Silos exists primarily because of the “change-resistant corporate cultures, conflicts and competition between internal constituencies, and a resistance to operational accountability, visibility and measurement.” Those were the reason 30 years ago when I first entered the corporate world, 11 years back when I left it, and today as I attempt to serve it as a consultant.
CMOs and their current marketing operational models face “significant challenges from entrenched corporate cultures, inter-departmental politics, and a lack of adequate data and information systems,”
The research, entitled Calibrate How You Operate, tells us that marketers face “a lack of corporate mandate for alignment and integration.” Forty-one percent of the 400-plus marketers audited “point to siloed data and limited cross-functional feedback loops as major internal challenges subverting the marketing operational process.” The CMO Council believes that “The study underscores the critical need for marketing to drive operational effectiveness and optimally structure, resource, and run today’s digitally driven, customer-centric, and globally distributed marketing organizations.”
Can cultures be changed? Not easily and not quickly. And the change can’t happen at all without the leadership of the President, CEO, COO, CFO and the Executive Leadership Committee. That’s too bad, because external marketing at it currently is practiced is going the way of the dinosaur; it is becoming extinct, although it is fighting to hang on. Inbound Marketing will eventually save the day because it is cost-effective and customer-driven. And when that day comes, social media will have a seat at the table alongside the CMO. Meanwhile, all this talk about social media’s value isn’t worth much when it is placed within a contextual vacuum. Instead, social media must be discussed within the context of Inbound Marketing, which as Valeria correctly says is about the simple fact that “we’re tired of being sold to, but we do like to buy.”

When you look at the data, it’s interesting to see that digital downloading from iTunes and others represents a very small percentage — less than 10% — of total revenue. The numbers from RIAA point out that in 2006, the reporting members racked up $9.6 billion in CD sales versus $878 million in downloads. Mobile downloads, from ringtunes to full downloads, are almost as large in revenue as music dowloads to iPods, at $774 million.
A rational person might conclude that CDs, while down double digits and facing the hippest of hip alternatives in the iPod, still represent the mainstream of music mindshare by virtue of their 9:1 advantage in tonnage. Fluff versus substance. Case closed.
However, let’s take our label glasses off for a moment and look at it from a consumer’s point of view. (We’re marketers, after all, and this is something we’re supposed to do at times, right?)
If we put ourselves into the average day in the life of a music consumer, how many music interactions did we all have in 2006? Well, 642 million CDs were bought. Compare this figure to 625 million digital downloads and 315 million mobile downloads and the balance shifts to the other side, with a ratio of 1:1.5 or so. We’re experiencing more music downloads on average.
Sure, we can argue about how many downloads happen at the same time just as we can discuss how many CDs an average person buys on Amazon (or even how many are bought used, which won’t show up here), or even the number of non-RIAA shipments are taking place. All true. Let’s focus on what we know for now and keep our eyes open for more data as it comes.
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Key Takeaways:
> How your consumer sees things is probably more important to you than how your peers in industry see them. You can usually count on them not readily acknowledging this, too. So use it to your advantage.
> Experience has more emotional impact than shipments, which means it will mean more to your brand.
> Any time you’re handed a sheet full of numbers, don’t stop at the summary. Do your own analysis and dig out what’s relevant to you, not the intern who put it together.
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What’s interesting in all of this is that music isn’t dead at all. The labels may be in dire straits but people — consumers, you know, the ones beyond the footlights — have re-discovered music in a semi-renaissance over the past few years through new ways to connect or re-connect with music. And venerable CDs are far from dead. They do, as we’ve seen above, represent the lion’s share of the market share in total revenue and oddly, it seems that most heavy iTunes consumers sample online and buy in physical form.
But you don’t need me to tell you that how we get our hands on all this music has been going though changes.