Marketing Unf*cked Siobhan Solberg

Mark Rofe is the answer to the question, ‘what happens when you combine a great mind for marketing with a love for humorous stunts?’ With several e-commerce businesses, a PR course, and a viral billboard campaign advertising himself in his portfolio, Mark has a unique perspective on digital marketing and PR. But is there anything he wants to Unf*ck about the industry?

If a company makes a $50m profit in its first year but goes bankrupt less than a decade later, should it be considered a successful business? It’s easy to equate success to sales, yet chasing short-term profits makes long-term success unattainable. Developments in digital marketing have made it easier than ever before to deliver quick results. Still, new businesses that jump in without doing the work to support cross-departmental collaboration will soon face stagnation. So, do we need to unf*ck marketing, or do we just need to learn to work together better to support business-wide goals?

Technology isn’t as smart as people think it is. Assuming our tools are clever enough to figure out what we want to know without additional input is a rookie mistake many businesses make. Unfortunately, this leads marketers to make decisions based on (unintentionally) confabulated reports — potentially tanking their conversion rate. With Universal Analytics set to stop processing new data in 2023, teams that aren’t educated in marketing analytics will struggle to benefit from the more convoluted GA4. But is that a bad thing? And what can analytics consultants do to better support businesses that don’t understand their reports (or read them)?

One simple truth is redefining the marketing landscape: consumers are getting smarter. With businesses like Amazon setting an increasingly high bar for customer experience, doing the bare minimum is no longer enough — especially when algorithms are learning to judge website quality on how much businesses care about their customers. But with so few willing to invest in delivering quality online experiences for their customers, what’s to be done?

Taking the path of least resistance can be incredibly tempting. After all, if a solution promises to fix all your business’s problems, isn’t it worth a try? In reality, clever tools and tactics never deliver the fix-all solutions they claim to offer. Only an understanding of how our work impacts that of others, fluid communication, and a willingness to learn can improve business operations in the long term. But in a world where ego reigns supreme, how do we make communication a priority and become less reliant on tools? Simply, how do we unf*ck this process?

What came first, the process or the insight? In an ideal world, a business’s processes would be informed by data, with teams seeking information to help them reach pre-established goals and objectives. But when it comes to data collection, can we really understand what we want to do with this information before we have it in front of us? And as clients become increasingly concerned about maintaining growth in a changing world, how do we convince them that collecting more data isn’t a business-saving silver bullet?