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This article originally appeared in Forbes on Jan. 2, 2025

Marketers eye 2025 with a mixture of optimism and fear. The economy seems resilient and new technologies like AI excite. Yet budgets are still under pressure and competition feels more intense, according to the latest CMO Survey from Duke and the AMA.

Forewarned is forearmed—and so, based on conversations with marketers and our own internal survey data, I propose eight trends to ponder going into the new year.

1. Content Gets More Average

Call it the pandemic esthetic: We favor the amateur style. It’s everywhere. Recent campaigns from AirBnB, Warby Parker, United Airlines and Apple’s “Shot on iPhone” celebrate the user-generated look. Glossy production values are starting to seem very 2019.

But the trend goes deeper. Search engines and prediction algorithms tend to move us in the same direction, removing quirks and outliers. For example, there’s evidence that academic papers are using similar words and pop songs are getting more alike.

And celebrities? They’ve gone from being glamorous aliens to less well-dressed versions of ourselves.

2. Consumers Are More Narcissistic

Yes, we are. I’m not talking about pathological narcissism, which affects fewer than 1%. Just ordinary self-centeredness, which some studies show is on a long-term upward ride.

Marketers should see this as an opportunity. After all, marketing itself is somewhat narcissistic, with its continual cries for attention and thinly veiled braggadocio. Embrace it; it’s the way of the world. It’s what brought Old Spice’s “Swagger” back, after all.

3. Your Best Customers Get Even Better

The rich are getting richer, and internal studies I’ve seen show that retailers are getting more and more value from fewer and fewer customers. Your best customers are more important than ever.

Thus the continual rollout of “VIP Experiences,” special treatment for the 1%. These super-loyalty programs are not only for hotels and airlines—they’re encouraging high rollers to roll, sharp dressers to dress sharper and even over-scheduled Disney families to ride with a guide.

4. RIP To The Browser Cookie

It’s the longest death scene in history: the demise of the third-party browser cookie. 2024 was supposed to be its final moment on Google’s market-leading Chrome browser, which has more than 65% of global traffic. I even wrote an obituary. Then Google famously changed its mind.

Advertisers have already moved on. The vast majority of digital ad spend is now on channels like mobile apps and streaming TV, which don’t use cookies. Google’s proposed requirement to have people “opt-in” to web tracking could bring the percentage of cookie-driven ads on the web below 10%. It’s baked.

5. The Marketing Funnel (Finally) Disappears

Big brands are still important, but an alarming number are losing steam. One reason? The path to purchase is collapsing. Scrolling Facebook, I can see an ad for a custom-tailored suit from a brand I’ve never heard of and in a few taps I’ve configured my model; a few more, it’s mine. I’ve gone from awareness to checkout in 90 seconds.

Shoppable ads are a funnel in miniature, and they’re getting more attention. And brands like Geico collapse awareness and conversion, connecting TV ads directly to quotes via on-screen QR codes and Amazon data.

6. Data Is The New Creative Bottleneck

Ask any agency AE old enough to know and they’ll tell you that creative was always the cap. Copywriters and artists could not produce as many versions of anything as the client could use. Campaigns were defined by creative person-power.

Not anymore. Generative AI promises to make creative versioning trivial and cheap, giving brands as much text and imagery as they want—and more. So what’s the problem now? In a word: data. Targeting and personalization require information, so campaigns will increasingly be defined by how much you know, not how much you do.

7. AI Threatens Introverts

I spent my younger years reading and writing and later got interested in computer programming, even as my fellow introvert friends took to art and math. Now what are large language models like OpenAI’s GPT good at? Exactly the same things.

It turns out that Claude and Gemini are introverts. LLMs and GenAI—so far, at least—aren’t good at classically extroverted activities like inspiring people, playing team sports and closing big deals.

What does this have to do with marketing? Well, I’d guess at least half of your team is in this threatened category. Be empathetic. Maybe suggest that they take, dare I say it, an acting class.

8. Every Business Is Now In Show Business

Picture this: 45,000 people from 140 countries, hanging out in downtown San Francisco with Matthew McConaughey, Kate Hudson and Pink, who is literally swinging like an acrobat across the crowd. Three days of some 1,500 “shows” seen by hundreds of thousands of people around the world via a Hulu-like subscription streaming app.

If this screams “CRM conference” to you, then you’re right. (It was Salesforce’s Dreamforce event, held last September.) If not, you don’t know the new rules of marketing. Even business-to-business software companies need to compete for fragments of prospects’ attention with gaming apps and TikTok dance-offs now.

What To Do For 2025

Earlier this year, I proposed some mega-trends for 2024. My conclusion: Marketers will need more first-party data, gathered with consent, to win. This is still true.

What’s changed? Consumers. Like cats, they are notoriously difficult to herd. In order to reach us, marketers have got to include themselves in the flow of our splintered lives on our own terms. This means weaving themselves into our social and streaming feeds via influencers and data-driven ad targeting.

This means removing friction everywhere we can, through shoppable ads, QR codes on TV screens or simply one-tap checkout or a more thumb-friendly app.

Above all, it means providing content that attracts us as much as user-generated, slyly self-important, joyful seven-second memes.

My new blockbuster shipped on October 28th — and you can order your copy now to beat the crowds at this link here

This article originally appeared on the Salesforce Marketing Blog 4/24/24

How can a customer data platform complement your data warehouse? By providing instant access to data without a lift-and-shift.

Remember the last time you moved? You probably had to pack up too much stuff, transport it in a truck and unpack it in the new location – hoping it survived the trip. Imagine if your furniture and belongings could just teleport to your new place in perfect condition. It’s not possible (yet) in the physical world, but with zero copy integration, that’s how you can handle your customer data.

Thanks to zero copy or zero ETL (extract-transform-load), it’s possible to share data among two or more data stores without actually moving it. This is great news to companies that store data in a cloud data warehouse like Snowflake or Google BigQuery. Some of them are reluctant to adopt a customer data platform (CDP) because they don’t want to duplicate data.

They don’t have to. Using zero copy integration, users can get the benefits of a CDP – like data harmonization, identity management, built-in analytics and activation – without the downside of physical data movement.

What you’ll learn

• What is zero copy integration?
• What is a data warehouse?
• How it works: from CDP to data warehouse
• How it works: from data warehouse to CDP
• How Buyers Edge uses zero copy technology

What is zero copy integration?

Zero copy integration makes it possible to access data that is sitting in multiple different databases at the same time without having to move, copy, or reformat anything. In addition to making access faster and easier, it cuts down on the expense and risk of errors that’s always incurred when data has to be moved or changed.

Copying data from one database to another is a common practice. Often, this process entails some form of data transformation called extract-transform-load (ETL). It can be a useful and even necessary step in managing enterprise data.

But it has its challenges. Some of the differences between traditional (copying) methods and the zero copy approach are:

	Traditional	Zero Copy
Replication	Source data copied from original location to target	Data remains in original location
Updates	Data only accurate as of last synchronization point	Data is accessed in real-time
Cost	User pays cost of moving and synching data	No data movement cost
Regulatory requirements	Harder to keep up with compliance due to more complex governance	User only responsible for source data
Errors	Any data movement introduces potential for errors or mistakes	No movement errors
Maintenance	Copying and synching creates more complexity	Easier to manage

Typically, the physical copying of data incurs costs for data transportation, introduces the potential for errors, complicates data governance and management, and creates data-synching time lags.

So how does zero copy integration work? The actual mechanism differs from platform to platform and is different whether you are accessing data from the CDP into the data warehouse or vice versa.

In the following examples, we’ll be using Salesforce Data Cloud as the CDP and our partner Snowflake as the data warehouse. Other vendors could be substituted without significantly changing the explanation.

What is a data warehouse?

A data warehouse is simply a reliable place to store and access data that is important to the business. 

Traditional data warehouses work with highly-structured data in formatted tables, and they tend to be quite slow and complicated. On the other hand, modern data warehouses like Snowflake can handle almost any type of data, process it quickly, and are easier to use. Because they are built on top of cloud platforms like Amazon and Google, they are easier to plug into other systems like CDPs that use the same platforms.

How it works: from CDP to data warehouse

In this case, we are inside our data warehouse and want to access data that is in the CDP. In other words, information is going out from the CDP to the data warehouse. This process is sometimes called data sharing.

The usual steps are:

1. Identify the objects – or data nuggets – within the CDP you’d like to share. In the case of Salesforce Data Cloud, these are called data lake objects (cleansed data), data model objects (structured by the CDP user for their business cases), and calculated insights objects (for formulas like lifetime value).
2. Using point-and-click, link these objects to the data share target, in this case Snowflake.
3. Inside Snowflake, the user can perform queries across data in Snowflake as well as the objects linked via the data share — all at the same time.

Behind the scenes, the process creates “virtual tables” that describe the Data Cloud data to Snowflake. A virtual table is like a window into data in a database, but instead of copying and storing actual data, a virtual table only contains the structure of the data. It’s a blueprint or pointer to the right place in the CDP to get the data – but the data itself stays in the CDP.

“It is possible to query live data in Salesforce from Snowflake and ensure that changes in the Salesforce objects will be reflected in Snowflake,” explained Salesforce Data Cloud product manager Sriram Sethuraman. “This will empower developers and data scientists to build machine learning models and AI-powered applications on top of the Snowflake platform by joining Salesforce and Snowflake data.”

How it works: from data warehouse to CDP

Now we are inside our CDP and would like to access data that is sitting in our data warehouse. This process is sometimes referred to as data federation.

There are a lot of good reasons to do this. Data warehouses like Snowflake and Google BigQuery usually contain a massive amount of data, including transactional data like purchases, and product data. Although not typical “customer” data, such information can be very useful when trying to calculate a customer’s loyalty status or build a recommendation based on details about products they buy.

For example, here’s how you can access data warehouse data in Salesforce Data Cloud:

1. Salesforce Data Cloud mounts tables from the data warehouse as external data lake objects. (Mounting is a process that creates a virtual data blueprint, like the one described above.)
2. Data Cloud performs its usual functions such as ID management, analysis, segmentation, etc.
3. The CDP can access data from the data warehouse by performing federated (or combined) queries that include data in Data Cloud and the objects that are provided by the data warehouse.

How Buyers Edge uses zero copy technology

The success of cloud-native data warehouses like Snowflake, Databricks, Google BigQuery and Amazon Redshift makes a lot of sense. We’ve seen many customers at least experiment with them and many use them as an integral part of their data architectures. But no data warehouse performs all the functions of a CDP, such as identity management and user-friendly analytics.

Buyers Edge — a leading procurement optimization company in the food service industry — wanted to build a unified customer profile in a CDP while accessing purchase data stored in a data warehouse. Their main goal is to provide better customer insights back to their sales and marketing teams.

Using the zero-copy connection between Data Cloud and their warehouse, Buyers Edge gains access to the purchase data it needs to build predictive models, allowing sales and marketing teams to produce better offers, messages and experiences for its prospects and customers.

“With zero-copy technology, accessing customer data stored in Salesforce becomes effortless, eliminating the need for data movement, duplication or reformatting,” said Sean Donahue, chief of staff for the Buyers Edge Platform. “This saves time and resources and removes data silos, harmonizes data for insights and analytics, and empowers businesses with a real-time holistic view of our customers.”

And as companies like Buyers Edge evolve, their requirements will change. That’s why a technology like zero-copy can help them and others build a more flexible data management strategy.

After all, larger enterprises have an average of 976 different applications running their business, and the amount of data created, captured, copied, and consumed is expected to more than double by 2026. Thanks to the power of zero copy data sharing, the looming data explosion will be a lot easier to enjoy.

Note: This article was drafted for my employers’ blog but never quite made it for various reasons; I present it for your private enjoyment. ed.

When you’re choosing a customer data platform, should you strap on the tool belt and go DIY or look for a full-featured solution? We’ll explain the difference and help you decide.

Composable customer data platform (CDP) is a term that puzzles a lot of mar-tech buyers. What does it mean? Is a composable CDP truly a new invention, just clever marketing, or something in between? Let’s break it down – and figure out what kind of CDP is right for you.

Currently, you’ve got two major CDP options to help you store and organize your customer data: full-featured or composable. What’s the difference? Adopting a full-featured CDP is like having furniture delivered to your home; a composable CDP is more like getting the kind of furniture you assemble yourself.

You can use full-featured CDPs to access data from key sources, harmonize it, manage identity, build and activate audiences for marketing, service and more. Composable solutions claim to provide a flexible architecture that can be adapted to your business requirements.

The good news is that you can combine the benefits of full-featured CDPs and composability without compromising on features or flexibility. 

For example, you can maintain a modern cloud data warehouse and still have push-button access to customer relationship management (CRM) data, as well as all the features you require for CDP use cases, without having to select and maintain a portfolio of applications.

How can you do this?

Short answer: adopt a full-featured CDP that has composable benefits like modularity.

Longer answer: in this blog post, I’ll review what composability offers and the requirements for a full-featured CDP. Then we’ll talk about how to get the best of both.

But first, let’s define what a composable CDP is and how it differs from a full-featured CDP.

• What is a composable CDP and how does it work?
• What is a full-featured CDP and how does it work?
• Full-featured or composable CDP: Which is better for customer experience?
• Can a full-featured CDP be composable?

What is a composable CDP and how does it work?

A composable CDP runs on a data warehouse and requires users to assemble the features they would like to include, much like building blocks. Components that the CDP does not offer (such as advanced identity management) can be supplied by other vendors. It is common for composable CDPs to have multiple vendors co-existing in the end solution, each performing different functions.

Composability is a concept in software design, and it’s widely used. For example, Wix helps customers build websites from different pieces – that’s composable. Data scientists rely on packaged libraries of functions that plug into Python and R — that’s composable. 

When thinking about a composable CDP vs. a full-featured CDP, it’s important to keep in mind that composability is an architecture, not a product.

What does composability mean for CDPs? To gain the benefits of composability, you need to look for a CDP that’s built using an architectural approach that supports modularity. It needs to be flexible, with robust application programming interfaces (APIs), and a lot of options for configuration and use case support.

The advantage of a full-featured CDP like Salesforce Data Cloud built using composable principles is it gives customers a wider range of options for implementation and deployment. I know customers of Salesforce Data Cloud who do their own identity management in a homegrown solution, relying on the CDP for segmentation and activation.

The same kind of modularity helps customers who want to do their own segmentation and audience-building, say, rather than using the CDP’s built-in tools.

What is a full-featured CDP and how does it work?

A full-featured CDP is a tool designed to organize customer data from different sources and provide an up-to-date, unified view of each customer. Unlike composable CDPs, full-featured CDPs contain all the CDP capabilities in a single product, including data ingestion, modeling, identity management and segmentation.

Full-featured CDPs arose to fill a need in the market: combining disparate data to create a connected customer experience across marketing, service, sales, commerce, and beyond. They also provide a great foundation for emerging generative AI applications.

That’s why there’s so much investment and innovation in the full-featured (also known as packaged) CDP sector. According to the analyst firm IDC, the packaged CDP market is expected to surpass $5.7 billion by 2026, growing about 18% per year.

As is natural in a fast-moving sector, misconceptions arise. I am happy to report they are nothing to worry about:

• Full-featured CDPs are not “legacy” systems
• They do not create another customer data silo

Full-featured CDPs are far from being last generation’s technology. On the contrary, full-featured CDPs like Salesforce Data Cloud are built using cloud architectures that avoid the challenges of legacy databases, both in speed and data requirements.

And saying that CDPs create yet another silo is kind of like saying the Google search engine creates just another website. Rather, full-featured CDPs take siloed data and make it available to the business. It’s the key to your customer data, not the lock. And some full-featured CDPs such as Salesforce Data Cloud provide access to data in data warehouses like Snowflake without copying.

“QUOTE TBDThe full-featured CDP “enables companies to smoothly unite their data, driving better customer insights and experiences. It’s shaping the future of data and AI-driven success,” said Rahul Auradkar, executive vice president and general manager of unified data services & Einstein at Salesforce. 

Full-featured or composable CDP: Which is better for customer experience?

Full-featured CDPs, unlike composable CDPs, have certain capabilities that make them foundational for a more connected customer experience. For example, when a major international racing organization needed to develop profiles of their 500 million fans around the world and connect with customers across channels like mobile, the web and advertising, they needed all the features of Salesforce Data Cloud.

Our customers tell us that CDPs – at minimum – need to be able to do at least five things:

1. Access data easily from sources like websites and warehouses
2. Harmonize the data so it’s consistent
3. Handle identity management
4. Create and explore segments and audiences
5. Activate audiences to channels like email, advertising, call centers, etc.

Which brings us to a challenge of composability: it’s not a set of features. So I always recommend that any technology buyer be absolutely sure that any product calling itself a composable CDP can do all the things that a good CDP does. That’s just common sense.

Companies that decide to go the do-it-yourself composable CDP route often find themselves taking on more technical overhead than they anticipated. They may have to implement and manage multiple tools from multiple vendors, without a common user interface or service-level agreements. The requirements for ongoing maintenance can be significant.

Another characteristic of full-featured CDPs is that they are generally designed to be business user-friendly, using clicks, not code. This distinguishes them from legacy tools and some warehouses that require a more technical user, raising talent and training costs.

Can a full-featured CDP be composable?

Luckily, a requirement of full-featured CDPs is not that you have to settle for a partial solution. It is possible to work with a CDP that’s also composable in principle — that combines a full CDP feature set with the added flexibility of a composable architecture.

One way to think about the different types of CDPs is to compare their different approaches to standard CDP capabilities, such as data ingestion and analytics. In general, cloud warehouses and vendors of so-called reverse-ETLs target a more technical, do-it-yourself user.

	Salesforce Data Cloud	Cloud Warehouse
Access to  CRM data	Easy point-and-click direct access to objects in CRM	Requires connector
CRM Access to CDP data	Direct zero-copy access to data in CDP from CRM	Requires connector
Access to Data Warehouse	Direct zero-copy access or file transfer	Usually included
Ingest from other apps	AppExchange marketplace, APIs, transfer	Marketplace, connectors or custom
Identity resolution	Advanced probabilistic capabilities built-in	Basic features or via partners
Identity graph	Unify any customer or entity data (e.g., events, model scores, attributes)	Managed in Data Warehouse
Schema used	Flexible, fully-customizable schema	None
Storage	Hyperforce multi-substrate cloud	Multi-cloud
Analytics	Point-and-click, Einstein & BYOM*	SQL based
Data activation	AppExchange, direct to destination or via transfer	From Data Warehouse
Cost	Consumption based; pay for what you use	Pay for features
Compliance	GDPR, CCPA and HIPAA compliant	May require BAA for HIPAA compliance
User personas	Designed for personas from the business user (no code) to developers (pro code)	Targets technical users (pro code)

Of course, there’s more to composability than just the CDP. Profile data should sit within the context of an enterprise architecture that enables you to build a more connected customer experience across your entire enterprise — from advertising through conversion, loyalty, service, win-back and more.

This more ambitious approach requires real flexibility at the platform level.

For example, Salesforce Data Cloud is built on the Salesforce core platform, which is metadata-driven and highly configurable. And it all sits on top of Hyperforce, our multi-substrate cloud infrastructure that provides trust, scale and governance capabilities across the enterprise (not available in all geographies).

Win-Win for the CDP Buyer

Composability is a great principle and we embrace it in our technical designs. 

So it makes a lot of sense to ensure any full-featured CDP you’re considering has the flexibility and modularity advantages that you might find in a composable CDP.

It also makes sense to scrutinize any product – whether it’s called “composable” or not – to make sure it’s going to do what you need it to do. In the case of CDPs, your requirements likely include data access, identity management, analytical workflows, and activation.

Believe it or not, it is now possible to have your data layer and consume it too.

We all know TED. Over 1,800 (available) 12-18 minute talks over 34 years. We know the format: conversational, casual dress, few images, a bare stage, a Big Idea.

There’s more. There are no devices allowed in the TED room. That’s why people pay attention.

And it turns out, they have a structure. I’ve made a hobby of Hollywood form, and there’s also TED form.

THE 2-3 WORD CALL TO ACTION

Of course, I’m not the first to notice this. There are dozens of blogs on how to nail your TED Talk, and like most blogs these are written too fast: embrace mystery and wonder … start and end strong … be yourself … and so on …

More useful — if rather twistingly meta — are some TED Talks on how to give a TED Talk. These get us closer to it.

* June Cohen (a TED producer) emphasizes keeping your personal story in the center, not rushing and staying non-technical

* Gordon Kangas stresses that you want to change the audience: inspire them to do something

* TEDx’s own how-to-give-a-TEDx pounds on the call to action at the end.

TED Talks aren’t meant to inform or entertain so much as inspire action. This is the existential difference between a TED Talk and a corporate speech. Perhaps it should not be.

Think about two of the more memorable TED Talks, ones you’ve heard even if you haven’t, if you follow me. Brene Brown on vulnerability and Amy Cuddy on the “power pose.”

They both had a simple message that could be:

• Summarized in 2-3 words
• Inspire positive action

That is:

• Brown: “Be Vulnerable!”
• Cuddy: “Stand with Power!”

Imagine casting your corporate talks as 2-3 word action statements. Would it work? How could it?

This leads me to the three reasons I think the TED Talk format is so durable:

1. They are short
2. They don’t use slides
3. They are more pep talk than lecture

THE SECRET RULE OF SEVEN

So I watched a bunch of popular TED Talks and sketched out their structure. There are seven parts. (I’m being reductive here, since there is variety in 35,000 global multi-lingual talks; but you’ll get the gist.)

These are:

1. PERSONAL ANECDOTE – start with a personal story that expresses, yes, vulnerability and makes you seem human
2. STARTLING FACT – make a startling statement that is true but not widely known (e.g., “If you eat a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, you will immediately gain half a pound” – true)
3. BIG IDEA – this is up to you, amigo
4. ARGUMENT – present your case in a logical sequence, structure as 3-4 mini challenge-solution narratives – i.e., present a challenge … a solution … another challenge … a solution … rising and falling like Freytag’s pyramid
5. “IN CONCLUSION …” – summarize what you just said, quickly
6. HOPEFUL FUTURE – describe a beautiful vision of a better tomorrow if only we could all do something … but what?!
7. CALL TO ACTION! – one thing you want to inspire the people to do

The key here being to inspire. People aren’t amused into action. They aren’t informed into action. They are inspired. The rest is up to you.

See you back stage at TED.

It has been 14 years since a little-known Utah State University professor named Stephen R. Covey published “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” which went on to sell 25 million copies and become the gold standard of the self-help genre. It is hardly Covey’s fault that his habits now sound like common sense, including advice to “be proactive,” “begin with the end in mind,” “think win-win” and “sharpen the saw” (that is, keep improving).

But as earlier self-help guru Dale Carnegie said, “The successful man will profit from his mistakes and try again in a different way.” In that spirit, and inspired by Covey’s own list, we suggest seven common marketing practices to avoid.

No. 1: “Bias for Research”

Ineffective habit: “Don’t make a move unless it has been validated and revalidated with primary, secondary and tertiary research. Discount hypotheses. Move methodically down internal pathways. Don’t field anything without unanimous buy-in.”

Consider Apple, whose founder Steve Jobs famously said, “We do no market research.” Jobs preferred to rely on the wisdom of his team, believing that consumers could not predict their own needs. Contrast arch-rival Microsoft, known to do extensive research before launching a product, such as the Windows Phone. Gartner estimates Apple’s share of the worldwide mobile phone market is 14.2% versus 3.3% for Microsoft.

Or take the case of television advertising campaigns, routinely subject to extensive copy testing before and after launch. Multiple studies have shown that the correlation between advertising pretesting and in-market results is weak and even negative. The U.K.’s Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) concluded, “Ads which get favourable pre-test results actually do worse than ads which didn’t.”

Why? Some answers were brought to the surface 40 years ago by Alan Hedges in his classic “Testing to Destruction.” Hedges argued that market research often forces people to construct rational justifications for irrational decisions, happens too late in the development process, and takes place under artificial conditions.

How to break this habit: Hedges’ answer, which still rings true, is not to avoid testing altogether, but to use it judiciously, with full knowledge of its limitations.

No. 2: “Always Be Closing”

Ineffective habit: “Treat every customer as a target. Do what it takes to convert. Pelt them with promotions and pop-ups. Make them register for access to anything. Put prominent links on your videos. Don’t waste time getting to know them too well. Pull out a contract at ‘hello.’ Practice ‘sign and dash.'”

An oily salesman in the film “Glengarry Glen Ross” spells out the mantra of “A-B-C,” as in: “A[1]always, B-be, C-closing.” Unfortunately for him, there is evidence that, unless you’re willing to be a perennial down-market discounter (“Everything on sale, all the time!”), strong-arm tactics undermine consumers’ perceptions of your value and the meaning of your brand.

One study showed that using an aggressive “closing technique” on prospects may increase one-off sales but tends to diminish trust, lowering the long-term value of the relationship.5 Trust in sales, marketing and advertising has been falling anyway over the past five years. For example, Nielsen’s latest “Trust in Advertising” report showed that 53% of people globally “don’t trust” television advertising, and 67% say the same of online advertising.

How to break this habit: It turns out that the solution to diminished trust is what people have been telling their significant others for years: Just listen. A different study on “perceived salesperson listening behavior” showed that, if people believe a salesperson is paying close attention to them, the result is “greater anticipation of future interaction.” Listening principles can effectively be applied in a digital context.7 Start with trigger-based CRM, adaptive site experiences and active social monitoring.

No. 3: “Begin at the Beginning”

Ineffective habit: “Who doesn’t like a surprise? When designing your marketing strategy, start with Wired magazine’s “What’s Hot” column. Do the same tomorrow. Put out fires. Focus all your attention on pain points, and don’t worry where you’re going. You’ll get there.”

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely studies the forces that cause us to drift toward obesity, insolvency or this-quarter business strategies. He calls them “present-bias focus,” a mental cost-benefit analysis that tells us a Sno Ball now is worth more than long-term health. We are inherently irrational, he says, and “the basic essence is the trade-off between the short term and the long term.”

Increasingly impatient shareholders aren’t helping. In a recent McKinsey & Co. study, 63% of executives surveyed said pressure to produce short-term results is increasing. However, a study sponsored by Europe’s Insead showed that this pressure often results in gaining short-term market share at the expense of long-term competitive position.

How to break this habit: Stephen Covey’s idea to “begin with the end in mind” was not a call to mindless optimism. It is a call to focus on long-term outcomes. And it anticipated recent studies showing that the best antidote to both short-term thinking and long-term overconfidence is a realistic, detailed anticipation of likely challenges and how to address them. Successful athletes visualize the race itself, not just the winner’s podium.

No. 4: “Fire the Know-It-Alls”

Ineffective habit: “People who know a lot about a certain subject can be opinionated and difficult. Who needs that? There is no ‘Ph.D.’ in team. Expertise is expendable. The smartest person in the room is the youngest. Why? Because he gets it. What’s ‘it,’ exactly? Nobody knows.”

Perhaps because of its relative youth as a discipline, digital marketing has a predilection for youth. Younger people are assumed to be more adept by virtue of their age — and, by implication, older workers’ digital skills are suspect. Although proof is hard to come by, anecdotal evidence suggests that marketing department layoffs hit older workers harder, and organizations may have a hidden motive to perpetuate the cult of youth: Young people are usually less expensive.

Skills are skills, of course, and youngsters can be extraordinarily adept. But evidence shows that there is no inherent advantage to being young in the workplace. Studies have shown that age is not well-correlated with job performance or creativity. And other studies show that the number of years of higher education and job experience a person has are positively correlated with strong performance appraisals, and negatively correlated with unproductive behaviors, such as absenteeism and substance abuse. Moreover, experienced marketers have the advantage of having seen trends and markets rise and fall, leading to a healthy skepticism.

How to break this habit: As one metastudy from Oregon Health & Science University concludes: “There is more variability in work performance within age groups than between age groups.” So the solution to this bad habit is to focus on the person, not the person’s age.

No. 5: “Repeat Yourself”

Ineffective habit: “What works best is what worked best. Whatever the product, service, channel, technique, creative or execution — if it worked before, it can work again. Refresh, don’t revise. You know what you know, and that’s all you know. You know?”

The business boneyard is littered with companies that held on to a winning formula well after it had wilted. IBM clung to mainframes, Kodak resisted digitization, Dell was late to the mobile millennium. As Microsoft’s Bill Gates observed, no leader in one technology era has gone on to lead in the next. “Success is a lousy teacher,” he says. “It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”

Consider Jill Barad, who tried to promote educational software at Mattel using the same techniques that worked so well for Barbie dolls. The results disappointed in part because software has very different marketing dynamics than dolls. Likewise, many U.S. automotive manufacturers clung to higher-margin trucks and SUVs late into the first decade of this century, even as the consumer scaled back.

How to break this habit: The secret to breaking this habit is not knee-jerk innovation but an unsparing analysis of market dynamics. Studies of the impact of innovation per se are ambiguous, showing (not very helpfully) that it works when it works. As Clayton Christensen argued in “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” few companies want to disrupt their own businesses. Winners are those, like Netflix, that are willing to undermine a dying market (DVDs by mail) to capture one that’s emerging (streaming entertainment) — that are willing to reinvent themselves on the fly.

No. 6: “Ask ‘What Would Google Do?'”

Ineffective habit: “Best practices are best — that’s why they’re called best practices. Apple and Google do everything right. No matter what business you are in, ask yourself, ‘What would [big popular company] do?’ Example: ‘How would Google groom dogs?'”

Not long ago, a digital marketing strategist found himself experiencing an eerie sense of deja vu. He had a meeting with a major airline about its e-commerce strategy, and the airline’s chief marketing officer said, “We need to become the Google of airlines.” Later that week, the strategist was meeting with a consumer packaged goods company, whose digital marketing lead asked, rhetorically, “How do we become the Google of breakfast cereals?”

These true stories highlight a common marketer’s mistake: assuming success can be dragged and dropped from one context (and industry) to another. Great companies surely have a lot to teach. Apple’s design aesthetic is something that designers are crazy not to study. But companies become great because their products and marketing exhibit their truth, not somebody else’s.

How to break this habit: The way out of this trap is to answer a question that is much harder than “What would [hot brand] do?” Namely: “What would my brand do?”

No. 7: “Think Win-Lose”

Ineffective habit: “Marketing is a zero-sum game. There are winners and losers. You know which one you want to be. It’s not complicated. Play to win. Bad-mouth competitors, and ‘borrow’ their ideas. Extract every cent from customers. Be cheap.”

Business is ablaze with sports metaphors, telling us to crush the competition and go for the gold. In the words of a Nike television commercial that aired during the Olympics, “You don’t win silver, you lose gold.” What can be forgotten in the hyperbole is that sports is actually a highly cooperative endeavor. If teams did not agree to abide by a lot of nit-picky rules, the game itself would cease to exist.

Economists studying game theory problems, such as the well-known “prisoner’s dilemma,” tell us that the most effective strategy — the one most in each player’s self-interest — is to be consistent, transparent and reliable. Economist Robert Axelrod describes such behavior as “the evolution of cooperation.” Today’s marketer lives in an increasingly engagement-intensive, always-on environment, in which customers are nurtured over time, and partnerships, such as co-branded media, are increasingly common. There is one important caveat. Cooperation is important only in games — or relationships — that are intended to last. “Winner take all” is a short-term strategy.

How to break this habit: You are welcome to think in terms of winning and losing when negotiating with customers, suppliers, vendors, consultants and agencies. Just make sure you’re not planning to do business with them again.

A version of this purr-fect article originally appeared in The Drum on Feb. 13, 2023, a few days after Super Bowl LVII aired. A picture of my photogenic muse Jerry appeared at the end (as it does below).

While some people say the Super Bowl was a close game, it really wasn’t. Dogs totally dominated cats in the USA Today AdMeter poll.

The Farmer’s Dog came in first with a time-travel tail – uh, tale – that showed just how good dogs are at nuzzling our emotions. Amazon’s bad-dog-turned-angel saga took third.

And where were all the spokescats? Not feline the love. One provided a whisker of comic relief in a Google Pixel ad, where a sour puss pointedly removes a dog from a photo with AI. Probably out of jealously.

It turns out, there’s a good reason for the double-standard. Cats and dogs evoke different emotions in people and can be used to inspire specific actions in marketing.

• Dog actors actually inspire us to make connections, take risks, and share our personal space
• Cat actors put us in mind to purr-chase more insurance, protect our homes and families, and prep for doomsday

So says a first-of-its-kind study which tries to quantify the impact of cat and dog talent on consumer behavior.

Dogs Say YOLO, Cats Say YOWL

Half of U.S. households have a dog and one-third have a cat – a number that continues to grow. One in five households even found a new furry friend to rescue them during lockdown.

And we are big spenders, not just on our pets. Pet owners tend to be more affluent, healthier, more confident, even better-looking (meow).

Pets appear often in entertainment, from Puss in Boots to every perfect-family-with-an-SUV TV spot, especially if it’s in the snow (cue adorable baby Bernese mountain dog). But the impact of our four-footed friends on our attitudes and behaviors hasn’t really been clawed over until recently.

The current study – a collaboration among universities in the U.S. and Hong Kong – wasn’t yet another meme about cat-people vs dog-people. It showed that dogs and cats actually evoke a chain of emotions in most consumers that is both different and predictable. They prime the message pump.

For decades now, many researchers have adopted an idea called regulatory focus theory, which claims there are two basic consumer mindsets:

• Promotion – focusing on gains, success, YOLO, being all that we can be
• Prevention – focusing on safety, preserving what we have, personal security, avoiding risks

Now we consumers aren’t all one or the other – except in the case of some fussy outliers – but have a mindset that can be shifted by social cues and marketing messages … which brings us to pets.

”This stream of research suggests that a promotion-oriented eagerness system better captures dogs’ temperaments and behavioral characteristics, whereas a prevention-focused cautious system better describes cats’ temperaments and behavioral characteristics.”

In fact, advertisers already intuited the study’s findings before it appeared. (And they exhibit a subtle anti-cat bias, which cats will remember when they take over the world.)

Cats are often used in dark and dyspeptic scenarios:

• Wells Fargo demonstrating “suspicious activity” on cards, pushing alerts
• Sainsbury’s (U.K.) Mog the Cat, disappointed by an empty dinner bowl at Christmas, warning us to shop early
• That alarming All-State ad where Mayhem cat-thropomorphizes from human to feline while his home decomposes around him

Meanwhile, of course, dogs tag along with kids in the sunshine and spread nothing but golden light and joy:

• Wells Fargo, this time with Regina King and a golden retriever promoting a cash-back rewards card
• Subaru Ascent … which featured no fewer than seven adorable goldens outside a condo sign-posted “The Barkeleys” and … I rest my case.

Cats, Fight Plaque!

The researchers got their human test subjects primed with dog (or cat) questions and images, putting them into the promotion (or prevention) mindspace. Then they asked them if they would buy toothpaste that would “freshen breath” (or “fight plaque”).

Not surprisingly, the dog-primed promotion-focused pack preferred the fresh-breath feature. The cat-primed prevention-focused pride wanted to take a swipe at that plaque.

Other scenarios found that the dog-primed pack was significantly more likely to:

• Participate in a lottery

• Buy stocks (vs funds)

• Buy vitamins that made wellness (vs prevention) claims

On the other paw, the cat-primed group was more likely to:

• Stay away from high-flying but risky stocks

• Put a higher value on preventative health services

• Spend more for products with prevention claims

The experiments controlled for factors like personal pet ownership, preferences and even mood. So again, it’s not just more cat-people-are-shy propaganda. Rather, it’s evidence that there is some stereotypical behavior in animals that triggers semi-unconscious associations in people. These associations in turn nudge consumers into a particular general mindset, which can bolster certain messages.

So now we have some guidelines for our feline- and canine-themed campaigns. That’s something to howl (or meow) about.