Some of the UK’s top marketers are still lamenting the failure of marketing to effectively communicate with boardrooms.
Speaking at Ad Week Europe on Thursday, TSB Bank’s chief marketing and communications officer, Nigel Gilbert, said in too many businesses marketing spoke a “different language” to the rest of C-suite.
While pointing out it was not true of his current role, Gilbert said marketing “fails to explain itself”.
“In previous lives, a big problem for advertising and marketing was that we speak a different language. We talk about non-customer considerations, NPS, creativity or insight and most people just glaze over. The boardroom just wants to know the results.”
Gilbert, who has previously worked for Virgin Media and Lloyds TSB, said it was important for marketers to educate the C-suite about what “really matters.”
“It’s not that they don’t think it matters, it’s that we speak about it in such a way that it actually bores them or doesn’t feel relevant.
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“They are really only interested in how successful the company is going to be. That’s not true of every company, but it’s true of many.”
Gilbert said he had gone as far as filming his customers, allowing them to talk both “emotionally and rationally” about the company, and then sharing the results with the board.
“I was effectively bridging the language gap with the CFO,” he said. “That was compelling.”
Meanwhile, Lisa Thomas, global head of brand & MD Virgin Enterprises, said marketing too often overcomplicates things that should be very simple.
“But if we articulate ourselves succinctly, that resonates with board members and customers,” she said. “That’s how you get traction.
“We’re often trying to be too clever, or we focus on the wrong things. Marketers can be too concerned with creative output and what the brand looks like, not what it delivers to the bottom line.”
Gilbert added the C-suite understands metrics – “because they can count” – and that marketing therefore had a duty to translate its impact into simple, measurable outputs.
