- The Beat by Rockstar CMO
- Posts
- Walk This Land
Welcome to The Beat by Rockstar CMO. I’m Ian Truscott, a CMO, 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 there!
I hope you’ve had a great week. Thank you for opening this email; I really appreciate it.
Recently, on the podcast, my chum Jeff Clark and I have been talking a lot about understanding where your company is when you are planning your marketing.
You could say you need to “Walk This Land,” which is a good excuse to write a newsletter named after a track by E-Z Rollers that featured in the soundtrack of one of my favorite films, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. As you know, this newsletter’s subject lines are always from songs.
We think you should consider the STARS model, which Michael D Watkins shared in his excellent book The First 90 Days, as you walk your company's land.
STARS stands for:
Start-up: Focus on growth and awareness
Turnaround: Urgent help is needed to recover
Accelerated growth: A scale-up, often following new investment
Realignment: There is a re-org, shift in focus, or reaction to a market change
Sustaining success: Maintaining growth demonstrated in previous years.
Deciding which one of these STARS your organization falls into will help you frame the challenge and how we approach marketing and our goals. It will also help frame our conversations with your leadership colleagues, as each of these STARS has a different need from marketing.
For example, typically, the needs of each goes something like this:
Start-ups need to focus on awareness, not just of the product, but also maybe the category or the problem is solved and maybe a prominent investor persona that needs to be marketed to.
Depending on the nature of the business and the situation, Turnaround companies urgently need demand generation to create new revenue and customer marketing to avoid churn.
Accelerated growth organizations are typically in an established category but need growth in awareness, like a start-up, to increase market share and voice. They will be hungry for revenue to provide a return on the external investment fueling this acceleration.
The marketing strategy for companies going through Realignment is tricky to generalize here. It will depend on the purpose or trigger of the realignment, which could be similar to a startup or a turnaround. This will require some discovery in the new direction.
Companies that Sustain success after a period of growth will need marketing to support diversification. This can involve focusing on growing market share with awareness and demand generation, customer marketing, and keeping existing customers to avoid churn.
This week on the podcast, we dived further into the R in STARS (Realignment) as there is a bit more to unpack, and we discussed 5 reasons for a company realignment that will impact marketing planning:
Acquisition
Being acquired
Change in product offering
Change in sales strategy
Rebrand and market change
I won’t cover all that here, Jeff did some great research for the podcast that we’ll no doubt share on our Street Knowledge blog.
Thanks as ever for reading this far, if you’d like help walking your land, please get in touch. It’s often good to get an outsiders perspective, as you might have heard on the podcast, I love chatting about this stuff and seen many of these STARS in my career.
Have a great week!
Cheers!
Ian
Ian Truscott | Chief Bottle Washer Rockstar CMO
Say hello, reply to this email or find me on LinkedIn or my personal website.
On the Podcast
Street Knowledge
From around the Rockstar CMO community and stuff I like :-)
I came across this today in my LinkedIn feed - shared by Andrew Bonar, the organizer of Martech Expo in Utrecht, NL, next week - 13 minutes of pure Sutherland gold!
Get your Monday Marketing Mojo Working
From the classic movie Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, this has to get your marketing moving….