This article originates from a presentation at the Revenue Marketing Summit in New York, 2022. Catch up on this presentation, and others, using our OnDemand service. For more exclusive content, visit your membership dashboard.
Hello everyone! I'm Ty Heath, Director of Market Engagement at LinkedIn’s B2B Institute think tank. If you're not familiar with The B2B Institute, we work with leading academics and practitioners to investigate how marketing can create more value, and we're going to do exactly that today.
We’ll link buying situations to brand sales, and I'll introduce a concept called category entry points.
I want to start with an idea, the idea that most purchases start not by searching Google for a product but by searching your mind for a memory. Now, if most buyer behavior starts with searching your mind for a memory, it follows that the job of marketing is not to generate clicks but to generate memories.
Marketers are in the memory business, and I think that's pretty exciting, but before we dig any deeper into this idea, let’s get a little bit of context.
Marketing’s reputational crisis
Marketing is facing a reputational crisis right now. There's a disconnect happening: many people aren’t clear on the value that we as marketers create and bring to the business.
I think we could do better at closing that gap and building bridges, especially with our finance departments. If we can learn to speak in a language that finance understands, we’ll be in a much better position.
So where's this coming from? Well, according to a study by Forbes, only 2.6% of over 65,000 board members in their database had managerial-level marketing experience.
