Yesterday’s post highlighted the distinction between the proportion of marketers that needed to have a basic fluency in finance (in our view, 100%) and the proportion that is actively seeking to integrate finance into how they think about marketing (in our view, a significantly smaller number).
We know that people do not go into marketing because their first love is numbers. People go into marketing because they love creativity – specifically, the type of creativity that creates a human connection.
Part of the T2 mission is to publish ideas and material that helps marketers craft productive responses to questions like “how do we know our marketing is working?” and “what’s the ROI on that?” and “how is marketing contributing to our business strategy?”
But the core of our mission (and the part for which we get paid) is to support marketers in companies with science-, engineering- or finance-dominant cultures. These are environments that are often deeply brand-skeptical because they assume that “emotion” is “illogical” (a classic Vulcan trait). Our role is to show that brands are about creating “emotional logic” – and that this is an essential enhancement to their existing “functional logic” if their goal is to have customers who want to have a relationship with their company, not just buy their products.
For these marketers, integrating marketing and finance is a need, not a want.
