Episode 220 / Jen Tanner / Accenture / Marketing Director
Uncovering the Power of a Good Marketing Strategy Brief
Jen Tanner is the Marketing Director at Accenture, where she’s recently taken on a role focusing on client relationship marketing for communication, media, and technology clients of the organisation. Her experience telling the Accenture story dates back to over 16 years with the company. Her Shiny New Object is anchored in the basics of marketing effectiveness: the marketing strategy brief.
For Jen, being a strong leader means investing time and effort into building strong connections with colleagues. Fostering a collaborative and supportive environment not only enhances team morale, it also leads to better recruitment and retention. By being a reliable mentor, coach, and attentive listener, Jen has seen firsthand the positive impact this can have on team dynamics and overall performance.
When it comes to marketing tips, Jen advises not to shy away from trying new approaches and technologies. Innovation and agility combined are essential for staying ahead of the competition. She shared an example of how her team capitalised on the opportunity of Amazon's Whole Foods acquisition, swiftly adjusting their marketing campaign to achieve better results than if they had waited to develop their creative more.
Jen's Shiny New Object is the marketing strategy brief. A well-crafted brief is crucial in shaping successful marketing initiatives. It helps marketers stay focused on the core purpose, strategy, and ROI of their projects. And It aligns marketing efforts with the company's values, goals, and identity.
Whether you’re looking to secure funding and executive sponsorship, preserve a marketing budget under threat, or innovate with a new creative direction, a robust brief is the answer. It helps define the problem - after all, in B2B, “marketing is a tool to solve a business problem.”
Going back to a brief can justify creative decision-making while empowering marketers to be bold, but effective.
Listen to more tips from Jen on using the marketing strategy brief to your advantage, hear more about her top marketing advice, and find out what new behaviour has changed her attitude in the workplace, on the latest episode.
Transcript
The following gives you a good idea of what was said, but it’s not 100% accurate.
Jen Tanner 0:00
I strive to set that culture where if I can be that person, if I can be highly collaborative, if I can be an impactful leader, it's setting me up to get the best people, people that want to work on my initiatives. I mean, there's the ROI for me, there's the ROI for the firm.
Tom Ollerton 0:43
Hello, and welcome to the shiny new object podcast. My name is Tom Ollerton. I'm the founder of the creative effectiveness ad tech platform known as automated creative. But today I'm doing a podcast with Jennifer Tanner, who is marketing director at Accenture. So Jennifer, for anyone who doesn't know who you are and what you do, can you give us a bit of background?
Jen Tanner 1:05
Hi, thanks so much for having me. Lovely to chat with you today. I am Jen Tanner, marketing director at Accenture where I've spent the last 16 years of my career. Just recently took on a new role where I'm doing client relationship marketing for communication, media and technology clients of Accenture. So telling the Accenture story of how we can help our clients become high performance companies. Prior to that I was doing marketing for the consumer industries for Accenture, spent a fair amount of time doing retail marketing was the last industry I served working on initiatives like rolling out our AI solution for retailers, working on shaping partnership agreement with Women's Wear Daily and bringing them into the firm, doing different initiatives, helping to tell our Accenture story to retail clients. And prior to that I was working for various marketing and advertising agencies and was in business for myself for a while.
Tom Ollerton 2:09
Right, I'm going to take that as license for me to call you Jen if that's okay.
Jen Tanner 2:14
Please do feel free.
Tom Ollerton 2:16
So that's quite the creds, that's quite the experience. I've got high expectations. So within that lovely patchwork quilt of different experiences, what new belief or behavior has improved the quality of your work life in the last five years or so?
Jen Tanner 2:31
Oh, that's, that's an interesting question. You know, I would say over the past few years, I've really come to realize the greatest return on investment of my time, is helping out connecting with a colleague. And that sounds like really basic and possibly even a little pollyannish. But if you think about it from the perspective of recruitment costs, if we are to lose an employee, I've heard stats that can cost anywhere between one to three times the salary of the new hire. And so like just connecting with other people, and that can come as a coach, a mentor, if it's offering a marketing perspective on an initiative, or even just sometimes being that sympathetic ear, for someone who's having a tough time or a rough go at it for the day. That really goes far. Um, you know, Accenture is an amazing firm, it's over 700,000 people around the globe, I get to work with phenomenal marketers and connect with people. And it's interesting, because just recently, I had someone reach out not on my team from halfway around the globe. Because they were familiar with some work I did, and thought that some of my materials might be helpful to them on some program that they were working on. And when they came to me, and I said, Yeah, absolutely, I'm more than happy to share my my things with you. But I think this is more of a conversation. And I set up a time with them. And that call ended up unfolding challenge areas, they felt comfortable with me. So they started to, you know, confess some challenges they were having. And it became such a much more fruitful conversation, rather than just talking about the campaign I was working on. It's funny, because we agreed, you know, let's keep this going. I wanted to be a source of help. And, you know, a coach, if you will, and we're actually chatting again this evening. And I just think that's great. That's really key to me, it's who I want to be as a leader. It's how I want to show up at work. Um, you know, and it's funny because on the flip side of that, years ago, one of my friends who was incredibly successful, she went to her managing director because she was getting a bit burnt out in the role she was in, she was doing it for a number of years. She was ready for a change and she had an idea of where she wanted to go within the organization. Unfortunately, the advice she was given at that time was "you're best off staying where you're at, that's where you've carved out your identity, that's where you should stay." And the irony is, you could probably guess where it's going, she got a cold call by a recruiter that very day. And within a few weeks she was gone and she was doing the type of work that she wanted to do. Now I know the managing director she went to, and he could have been having just a bad day, wrong time, he could have been overwhelmed, a lot going on. But even just to handle something like that, if I was in that position, I would say, "This is a really important conversation. I can't give it the focus and attention it deserves right now, reach out to my PA and put some time, you know, next week or even in two weeks time, however long you need." But I just think you've got to remember, at the end of the day, we're dealing with human beings. And they need to get the attention and the focus when they need it in that moment. Yeah, within reason in that moment, I'd say.
Jen Tanner 2:38
I will only say it goes beyond recruiting and retention, retention. There was an article that was making the rounds, I don't know if the algorithm served it up to you, but it was asking you, do you have a best friend at work. And they were talking about the value of having a best friend, having that person that you can reach out to. And it's funny because it seems to be been making an impact, because I even saw it come up on a recent employee satisfaction survey that I was filling out. So it's beyond if you strive to set that culture where if I can be that person, if I can be highly collaborative, if I can be an impactful leader, foster that trust so that I can also hold people accountable, have the difficult conversations when you need to, it helps the organization as a whole, not so much it affects my reputation, it's setting me up to get the best people, people that want to work on my initiatives, people that know, I'm going to protect them, make sure that their good work is showcased. I mean, there's the ROI for me, there's the ROI for the firm.
Tom Ollerton 7:12
And now looking for more practical marketing advice, what would you say is your top marketing tip?
Jen Tanner 7:17
Oh, my top marketing tip. You know, I would say don't be afraid to try, test, learn, move swiftly. You know, I work in a b2b environment, and marketing campaigns, they'll go up to the C level of fortune 500 companies, stakes are really high, coupled with the fact you know, going back to this enormous firm that I work for, it's by nature, we're going to be matrix. So there's a lot of different avenues and pathways you have to take to get something out off the ground. But you can't let that stop you from innovating, moving fast. Otherwise, you're gonna miss that window of opportunity for creativity. Like, I actually have an example of thinking back to the day that Amazon announced they were going to purchase this whole is. Well, this was ironically, when I was working in the retail sector for through Accenture. And I have been working on a campaign for like couple months, we are going after a grocery, we're going after quick service restaurants. That was the audience the campaign was going to address. And then the day that the announcement came out, although it was two weeks early, I thought we have to go live today, I have to take this live. This is just too much of an opportunity. And we were able to turn it really quick on a dime. We redid the Social Media Campaign aspects so that we could address what was happening in the marketplace talking about mergers and acquisitions, talking about a time of disruption for grocery and got it out and getting phenomenal metrics and had we not been prepared to move fast. make those changes. rally the efforts of the team on a dime, we probably wouldn't have seen the launch metrics that we did, quite frankly.
Tom Ollerton 9:53
So, we are at the halfway stage and I'm going to talk about your shiny new object, which is the marketing strategy brief, which doesn't seem like a shiny new object to me, so I'm really curious to know why you've chosen this as your shiny new objects and just help the audience explain specifically what it is.
Jen Tanner 10:13
Yeah, I really went classic here, didn't I? I mean, I'm sure you thought I was going to say something like ChatGPT / bar generative AI, you know, with all these technological advancements that we're facing right now. But all jokes aside, I love a creative strategy brief. I love working on them. I love setting the team up that's going to do the executing and partnering with me for success. And, of course, we're all incredibly excited about the possibilities of generative AI and how that can impact marketing is really significant. We're all experimenting. You know, we're piloting we're looking at various use cases, having important conversations about intellectual property, biases and algorithms and things of that nature. But generative AI technology, I think you need to think of it as a copilot, not autopilot. And a strong strategy brief is going to help you do that.
Jen Tanner 11:14
So think about it this way marketing in the business to business space, it's ultimately used to solve business problems, or capitalize on business opportunities. The strategy brief helps frame that successfully. And it's going to keep you very honest about your purpose, your strategy, and ROI. The other reason a brief is so critical, a really strong brief is if you're facing a period of economic contraction, or economic instability, like we're going through right now, to some extent, a lot of times in different companies, a marketing budget may come under threat, that can sometimes be the first thing that companies will cut. So it's really critical to be laser focused on how your initiative is going to help make money, how is it going to be successful? How do you plan to get there? What metrics are you using to gauge success? What is good gonna look like and it helps you tell that story, to get the funding, get the executive sponsorship that you need, get your program out there. And it just goes back to the brief. To me, it's just so critical. And it also helps, it can be a handy tool. Sometimes opinions will creep in when you're doing creative execution of it for marketing, b2b b2c. And going back to the brief, being able to have a very strategic conversation can help take that off the table. You know, it's funny, we're talking about generative AI. There's a recent ad campaign that crossed my radar through the trade publications. And what it was, it was this ad campaign, and it used AI generated images of aging farm animals. And the company that these images were used for, the company that was being advertised, they sell animal free milk, burger products, food type products like that. But what was really interesting is the way this company operates is they use AI to tap into databases of 1000s of plants and plant based ingredients. And that's how they come up with their products' recipes. And so their use of generative AI created these really compelling, beautiful images of aging farm animals telling the story, just reminding people, if you'd make a plant based choice, it helps lives that are sometimes cut short from a farming perspective. So here was this really strategic intent to use AI generated images, it was core to the company's overall strategy, core of their identity, it was incredibly thought provoking and very strategically sound rather than being a gimmick or just being a one off. And you know, it was one of the early ads was out in the market using generative AI technology. So as I mentioned, it crossed my radar through trade publications and got picked up and got a lot of coverage. And then that coverage, they did talk about how their ROI was maximized, because it was a tremendous cost savings. But again, like going back to that example, you can see, this was really about a lot more of a strategic choice than just going after the shiny object and trying something new. So these are the things that are top of mind when I talk about because like I think there's not a marketer alive that they're trying to get something off the ground and they don't say "I gotta fill out a brief first," whatever your language is a lot of great versus writing or creating. You better sit down and check your strategy make sure that it's sound, make sure that you have the right business inputs. You know, I again, that b2b consultancy environment, we're at times selling complicated things. So you want to make sure that you're using the brief so that you're really getting to the heart of your audience, the heart of what you're setting out to do.
Tom Ollerton 15:14
Set yourself up to write a good brief, I've definitely been guilty of Oh, like, I'll fill out a brief. And I love that. That's such a great bit of advice. If you hear yourself saying those words internally, that's a red flag. So how do you give it the attention it deserves? How do you set yourself up to make sure that the brief that comes out from you to whoever it's intended for is as good as it can be?
Jen Tanner 15:37
That's such a good question. I mean, the first thing I ask if you're feeling that way, as well, is your brief serving you well, is it asking the right questions. It's not a static thing. I mean, if you're changing it with every project, then it might be a little bit of the tail wagging the dog. But for example, like a brief can be a great way of infusing company values into your work. You know, we've all been in different places where you might see it's like, oh, we've got this mission statement. We've got what we stand for, and what our purpose is, but it resides more on a plaque on the wall than actually in the day to day. So like, for example, now, granted, this was 10 years ago. But we shifted our creative strategy brief to include two questions around how inclusion and diversity themes might be captured in the creative and inour storyline. And that was, it's a subtle shift. But it kind of set us up so that we stopped looking at I&D as a separate stream, the separate program and thing that we would roll out and infused it across. And like, here's just a really simple but tangible example. So we were casting for a video we were producing someone was going to play the role of a CEO and a company. And then the agency said, Okay, well, we'll get headshots and bios from middle aged men, for us to cast. And we said, oh, wait a minute, well, why not a woman. So it's just it brings that like, we all have unconscious biases, but it brings admitting the first step, right. That's how we're going to address them. And having those types of questions in a brief helps bring it top of mind. And then also, you're saying, you know, if you get in that mindset of, Oh, I've got to fill out the brief, like, the first thing I would ask you is, do you really believe in what you're doing? Do you really think it's going to move the needle or make change is a tactic that somebody gave you that's looking for a strategy versus that something's really hot, you know, homegrown, coming from a strategic intent. And I would go upstream and really look at going back to this statement about it. Marketing is a tool to solve a business problem. So what's the problem that we're trying to solve? And then in then sometimes, you know, if it's a very high level overarching problem, what are the nuances what what pieces can we snap off, what's unique about the audience, what's going on in the market that we're trying to capitalize on, you know, and then it might be a situation where you meet, maybe you need to augment with some research, maybe you need to do some persona development, maybe you need to just have some interviews with folks... I keep going back to the example of where I work, but I have the good fortune that I am surrounded by phenomenal subject matter experts, you know, people that have really deep knowledge around artificial intelligence, or people are incredibly astute from a talent management and organizational performance perspective. Um, people enjoy being an expert, they'll give you 10 minutes to hop on the phone bouncing questions off of them, make sure you really understand what you're chasing after, for your marketing initiative. And that is going to make that brief that much richer.
Tom Ollerton 18:48
Unfortunately, we are at the end of the podcast now. So Jen, for anyone who wants to get in touch with you to discuss the things you talked about today, where and how would you like them to do that?
Jen Tanner 19:00
I'm tannerjenl on LinkedIn.
Tom Ollerton 19:03
And what makes a great outreach message to Jen?
Jen Tanner 19:05
What makes a great outreach message is if it makes me pause and think or laugh, you've got it.
Tom Ollerton 19:13
Brilliant, Jen. That's fantastic advice. Thank you so much for being a guest on the podcast.
Jen Tanner 19:18
Thank you for having me. It was great chatting with you.
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