Marshall Butler is Managing Director, Head of iShares Asia-Pacific Marketing at BlackRock

Marshall Butler is Managing Director, Head of iShares Asia-Pacific Marketing at BlackRock. In this role, he directs all marketing strategy and execution for iShares Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) in Greater China, South-East Asia, Australia and Japan.

What main issues are you dealing with marketing for a financial institution in Asia?

Coming out of the global financial crisis, there’s a healthy degree of skepticism associated with products that have traditionally positioned themselves as innovative and new and different. But there’s also an interesting appetite in learning about new types of investment products, when many investors feel that perhaps some traditional instruments have not performed in the way they expected.

For me, being responsible for rolling out the iShares brand and activity, it’s a very rich opportunity insofar as people are looking to complement past investment tools with new types of tools like exchange traded funds.

For iShares, the issue is largely around market education, helping people understand how the tool works. I think in many ways marketing an ETF in Asia-Pacific – or in North America or in Europe – is really like marketing an innovation. There’s a tremendous amount of education that needs to happen. Then you also need to identify and activate your early users, and then encourage them to become advocates for the product within their community.

How is marketing in Asia different from marketing in the United States?

If I look at differences between Asia Pacific and the U.S., the way that investors think about the product is, at the highest level, quite similar across the geographies. Of course, the biggest distinctions are around regulation and then of course, just simply cultural attitudes toward investing, saving or financial products.

For example, Japanese investors tend to be much more conservative in their approaches, and that includes in terms of their willingness to move into new types of products. In Hong Kong in particular, you see a significant amount of individual investor participation in the equity markets, which I think is unusual, particularly compared to the U.S. Then Australia has a significant amount of home bias, in the sense that Australians prefer to invest in Australia. That’s not 100 percent true in all cases, but there’s an interesting preference there.

For companies looking to expand into Asia Pacific, what factors should they be aware of to build their brand in these regions?

It’s important to be sensitive to local norms. Particularly in the financial services industry, the balance between being local and foreign is really critical.

As an American financial services institution, being foreign or international in some of the more developing markets around Greater China or Southeast Asia, that’s a real plus. It can give you credibility with our longer track records. For example, when we first started marketing iShares in Asia Pacific, we didn’t shy away from being an international company. In fact, it was a real benefit. The memory of the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s is still in people’s minds.

But of course it goes without saying that you need to try to balance that with being locally relevant. That’s probably a challenge that many marketers will face.

When we developed our Chinese name for iShares, we wanted to communicate that we were big, that we were global, that we were iShares, from the United States with offices across Europe, but the same time to give a nod to the fact that we were excited about doing business with Asian investors. That was evident in both the logo treatment for our Chinese name and the name itself.

What channels have been the most effective reaching your targeted audiences in Asian markets?

One thing I find interesting is that an institutional investor or a sophisticated professional investor in Asia Pacific to some degree will have more in common with a professional in London or in New York than they will with an individual investor. I will attend events in Hong Kong, or London, or Mexico City, and I will see the same types of people.

What’s fascinating for a marketer is that, yes, I am marketing to a Japanese investor or a Chinese investor, but this individual will probably have spent time in London and in New York during the year, so the idea of being global is extremely important.

How are social and digital channels impacting your marketing strategies in Asia?

Adoption rates have been high, so it’s definitely on the horizon here. We’re still trying to determine the best way to use social media for the professional investor segment. How to use Facebook, Twitter, and those sorts of media haven’t yet become clear in our world.

The biggest challenge that we’ve got in the financial services industry is ensuring that we are compliant with regulations in terms of what we communicate. What you’re seeing from the asset management space is experimentation on the fringes. We have launched a blog for our U.S. business. We have done things with our website where people can share content. Going forward, it’s definitely something that we want to be investing in.

Nine Silver Bullets to Increase Marketing's Relevance: Enabling Greater Competitive Differentiation and Faster Revenue Growth

By Michael Cannon

The question, “What do we need to do to make Marketing more relevant to customers?” has been a topic of discussion in articles and books for decades. Yet the answer continues to be elusive, sapping resources from every business.

While there are many good ideas for “what to do,” true improvement remains minimal. Our problem is asking the wrong question. Instead, we need to focus on the systemic, root cause issues: Why is it so difficult to increase customer relevancy? Understanding “why” yields a more useful answer to “making Marketing more relevant to customers.”

Before answering these questions, let’s clarify some terms. “Customer” includes both Marketing’s internal customers such as field sales, inside sales, sales operations, and field marketing, and its external customers such as the end users, channel partners, market and financial analysts, and investors. “Marketing” includes the product management, product marketing, and corporate marketing teams.

The Big, Visible Disconnect

Peeling the onion back on customer relevancy, you find the disconnect focused primarily on four categories of marketing deliverables:

1. Customer-facing collateral (company website, brochures, etc.)
2. Demand generation (advertising, events, etc.)
3. Internal-facing sales tools (competitive analysis, market opportunity overviews, etc.)
4. Sales support training (product training, competitive training, etc.)

Often, it’s not the deliverable that’s the problem but rather the ineffective content in the deliverable. Content focused on your product and what it will do is less impactful than focusing on how the customer can more successfully achieve his or her business objectives using your product.

Nine Silver Bullets to Fix the Disconnect and Increase Marketing’s Relevance

Now back to the question of “why.” Below are nine reasons why it’s so difficult to advance Marketing’s relevance to customers and some practical ways improve:

1) Poor visibility into the true cost of ineffective content. SBG research indicates that the true cost of ineffective content is between 10% and 30% of a company’s annual revenue. In the U.S. alone, B2B companies lose hundreds of billions of dollars annually using content that is not customer-value-based, differentiated or segmented. Since no line item exists in the P&L for the cost of ineffective content, the cost is hidden amidst higher discounting, lower win rates, slower revenue and declining market share growth.

Solution: Gain visibility into the true cost by conducting assessments such as a Sales/Channel Time Usage Study, Collateral and Sales Tools Gap Analyses, or targeted surveys.

2) Inaccurate map of the categories and types of messaging required for market success. There are three types of conversations we need to have with end-user customers, as defined by their primary buying questions:

• Why should I meet with you?

• Why should I change-out my current solution for a new solution?
• Why should I buy this new solution from your company instead of from competitors?

The problem is most companies are using corporate, market, and product messaging to answer these prospective customers’ questions, and it’s not working. These categories of messaging are too high-level and descriptive to be effective. What’s missing is an entire category of messaging called “sales messaging” designed to provide highly persuasive answers to the prospective customer’s key buying questions. It enables the sales conversation that both Marketing and Sales need to have with customers.

Solution: Using the sample customer messaging map as a reference, create a company customer messaging map that’s aligned with Marketing and Marketing’s customers. Then create the required messaging and integrate it into your content and marketing deliverables. The result gets all stakeholders on the same page prior to the development of your messaging and go-to-market tools.

3) Lack of clear differentiation among messaging, content, delivery tools and tactics. Messaging is integrated into the content and then integrated into delivery tools. But by separating messaging from content, you can make sure the content is highly effective. And by separating content from delivery tools, you can reuse that content within multiple delivery tools, including landing pages, collateral, whitepapers, websites, and presentations (for Marketing), and competitive briefings, ROI calculators and call guides (for Sales).

4) Misguided priority setting. Messaging is not seen as the only item that impacts the effectiveness and success of marketing deliverables. Instead, it is just one of many marketing deliverables (demand generation, collateral, website, sales tools, channel training, PR, etc.) that must be produced to launch and support products.

Solution: Get your priorities right. Acknowledge that messaging is “the fuel” on which your marketing and sales engines run. Then reprioritize and renegotiate deliverables with stakeholders so that you have more of the resources and time needed to produce highly relevant messaging, content, and deliverables.

5) Erroneous business model for allocating sales and marketing resources. A large percentage of the work needed to enable the channel (field and inside sales, customer service, channel partners) to successfully sell products and services is not clearly defined across marketing and channel organizations. As such, the resources required to complete channel readiness are not allocated correctly or are underfunded. Studies indicate that 25% or more of the channel readiness work is done by the channel, one rep and one deal at a time, as the high-level descriptive messaging is translated into sales conversations.

From a business model perspective, it would clearly be more effective to have Marketing do this work and then leverage it across the entire channel organization. However, tasking Marketing with more channel readiness work will have limited success. Most marketing organizations are already resource-constrained and unable to fulfill their current commitments.

Solution: Evaluate how much time and effort your channel invests into re-creating messaging and collateral, and calculate the dollar value of the work. Then create a channel readiness model that defines the messaging and tools needed to support the sales cycle, from lead generation to retention, and agree on which stakeholder is responsible for creating each deliverable. Combine this work with the ideas above, and you will have a much better business model for allocating sales and marketing resources to drive greater market success.

6) Ineffective new product development process (NPDP) or commercialization process. In addition to fixing the business model, the NPDP must be revised. The NPDP in most companies focuses on how to bring new products and capabilities to market quickly. While these capabilities are typically wanted by the target customer, they don’t often help solve meaningful customer business problems – in particular ones the customer would be willing to pay for. Additionally, the NPDP produces mostly high-level descriptive messaging and with it less-effective channel readiness tools.

Solution: For greater market success, reframe the product development process into a customer development process. You can move in this direction by into the NPDP, starting at product definition. Combine this work with #5 above to achieve a more effective process bringing new products to market.

7) Lack of skills to create the most persuasive messaging (sales messaging). Most marketers do not have skills to create highly persuasive messaging, though they think they do. Until recently, however, we have not had objective criteria to evaluate messaging effectiveness prior to testing or launch, nor a methodology to create highly persuasive sales messaging.

Solution: Use the criteria above to assess your current content and deliverables. If there is a meaningful gap, create an internal core competency around sales messaging. Hire a firm with expertise enabling organizations to successfully create, integrate and deploy persuasive messaging, as well as the most effective collateral, demand gen campaigns, sales tools, and sales support training. If the skill set was easy to develop internally, many of the problems discussed in this article would not exist.

8) Poor alignment around the definition, rating, hand-off, follow-up and reporting of leads. There must be a Dilbert cartoon for this infamous pain point between Marketing and Sales. Marketing complains it produces ample leads but Sales never follows up. Sales complains the leads are suspect and thus useless, and/or too time-consuming to chase.

Solution: Create a sales and marketing effectiveness task force and empower it to create solutions around this pain point. Stop treating lead generation as a one-off campaign and start treating it as part of the customer development business process. Then automate with a marketing automation platform and use sales messaging as the secret ingredient to achieve the best demand generation results.

9) Limited sales experience. Some believe marketing professionals will always struggle with customer relevancy because most have limited sales experience. They lack fundamental knowledge of what customers need to make good buying decisions and what Sales needs to enable those good buying decisions.

Solution: While hiring more marketing professionals with sales experience and/or rotating marketing professionals into Sales (or visa versa) makes sense, it’s often time-consuming and an expensive long-term solution. By implementing one or more of the ideas in this article, you can cost-effectively enable Marketing to understand what its internal and external customers really need and how to give it to them. These ideas will make Marketing more relevant to customers, create greater competitive differentiation, and drive faster revenue growth.

Michael Cannon is an internationally renowned sales and marketing effectiveness expert and best-selling author on topics related to sales messaging and sales/marketing enablement. For more information, visit www.silverbulletgroup.com.