Hit or Miss?

Welcome to The Beat by Rockstar CMO. I’m Ian Truscott, a 3xCMO, trusted advisor, strategy consultant and Chief Bottle Washer at Rockstar CMO. In this newsletter, I’d like to share a mix of what’s caught my eye from our community, our podcast and our street knowledge blog.

Hello!

This week on the podcast, my chum and regular guest, Jeff Clark, was back after a month's break from travelling to Europe.

If you are a regular reader of this newsletter, firstly, thank you. You’ll recall that two weeks ago in the Natural Mystic issue, I dug into Forrester’s term “Frontline Marketing.” As Jeff is a former Forrester Research Director, I thought I’d ask him about it.

Jeff joined the podcast in January 2021, and we resurrected a format we’ve done over the years, deciding if a marketing buzzword or a new technique is a “one-hit wonder” or “Wonderwall” named after the Oasis hit that was big on both sides of the Atlantic.

No spoilers here on if we thought Frontline Marketing was a “one-hit wonder” or “Wonderwall”, you’ll need to listen to the latest episode of the podcast to get Jeff’s opinion; you know mine from this newsletter.

But, for this issue of the newsletter, I thought I’d share some of the other things we’ve judged on over the years.

We’ve only scratched the surface of the plethora of acronyms, buzzwords and techniques seeking to make our craft more complicated, driven by technology vendors creating new categories, analysts looking to claim their hill of thought leadership and consultants and authors looking to sell niche expertise and books on some new remix of B2B marketing basics.

However, digging through all our old episodes, here are the things we’ve thought of as one-hit wonders and Wonderwall (the number is the podcast episode).

One Hit Wonders

• #132 - Revenue Operations

• #63 - Marketing Orchestration - (specifically Forrester’s definition)

• #54 - Content Marketing Platforms - (they are just content management systems with some key features, not a new category)

• #53 - Outsourcing your marketing brain

• #50 - Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

• #47 - Personalization (the rubbish kind)

• #46 - Growth hacking/ marketing

• #45 - Digital Marketing

• #44 - Marketing Attribution

Wonderwall:

• #178 - Lifecycle Revenue Marketing

• #70 - Virtual Selling (Keith Smith was the guest for this one, not Jeff)

• #62 - Intent Marketing

• #55 - Marketing Resource Management

• #52 - Marketing Education

• #51 - Data-driven marketing

• #43 - Agile Marketing

I have a confession to make: At this point, I realized, listening back to some of these, that we are not always consistent.

When we decide a term is frankly bullshit, it’s just good B2B marketing, we might say it’s a one-hit wonder because we believe the term will die, but the practice will live on (like Revenue Ops or ABM).

But, sometimes, we say Wonderwall, as we did with Lifecycle Revenue Marketing, another term from Forrester that states the bleedin’ obvious in terms of what B2B marketing does. So again, the term is a one-hit wonder, not the practice, that’s a Wonderwall.

Sometimes, we’ve recognised this challenge and decided it’s not a binary decision, and for a couple of these discussions, we’ve added a third option.

The first third option we tried first was “One to Watch”, and two things fell into this category:

• #61 - A.I. writing content (David McGuire was the guest, not Jeff)

• #60 - Customer Journey Orchestration

Please bear in mind that episode #61 was three years ago, and we considered “AI writing content” to be one to watch—that’s not bad!

As well as “One to Watch” we’ve also stayed a bit truer to the Rockstar CMO musical roots with a third option, “Stevie Wonder” a reference to his long career of hit after hit. Here are our Stevie Wonder’s

• #194 - Case Studies

• #195 - B2B thought leadership

Those are the topics we’ve covered so far. We would love to know what you think, or maybe you have a suggestion, hobby horse, or pet peeve that we should examine.

And of course you can find all these episodes at Rockstar CMO FM, if you’d like to hear more of what Jeff thinks.

And in researching what track to drop in this newsletter, I unearthed a classic from 1970, Hit or Miss by Odetta, and I’ve been listening to her album “Odetta Sings”, give it a go.

Thanks again for opening and reading this far, I hope you like the links below and please hit reply if you have any ideas or feedback.

Enjoy your week!

Cheers!

Ian

Ian Truscott | Chief Bottle Washer Rockstar CMO

Street Knowledge

Just a couple this week, as I couldn’t link to ALL of the episodes I listed above!

Wonderwall

Be rude not to include these fellas, having mentioned Wonderwall so many times….

Get your Monday Marketing Mojo Working

Although it was released before my time, it's an absolute classic this week for getting your Monday morning marketing mojo working….