New institute promises to help marketers driven crazy by complexity

Mention the words ‘Institute’ and ‘California’ and you’d be excused for imagining something along the lines of Jejune in San Francisco.

However, there’s a new, less bizarre institute in town, and it’s one that hopes to offer marketing professionals more clarity about the complexities they currently face in their ever-changing job role, offering training programmes on engagement marketing and data management that “universities and business schools don’t teach”.

The Marketo Institute will launch as a marketing research centre in San Mateo with the aim of educating brands on modern marketing disciplines such as delivering insights from data, customer lifecycle management and cross-channel engagement.

“The mission of the Marketo Institute is to educate marketers and empower leaders for the new era of engagement marketing,” says Jon Miller, executive director of the Marketo Institute and co-founder of Marketo.

“The marketing classes in today’s universities and business schools don’t teach the new techniques and strategies required for today’s marketing. And without the right guidance, marketers are forced to rely on guesswork, tribal knowledge, and trial and error to figure out what works. Marketers are hungry for data-driven benchmarks and actionable insights that they can use to drive their future plans and determine the success of their current efforts.”

Getting to grips with customer and organisational data has become the marketing professional’s toughest challenge, perhaps summed up by a quote from Andrew Davies in a recent article on MyCustomer:

“[Consider the marketing challenge of] demographic data – thinking that knowing a person’s age, postcode, gender and income would be the best proxy for understanding what makes them tick.

“Yet whilst Prince Charles and Ozzy Osbourne are both male, married, 65, with an annual income over £1.5 million and a residence in Buckinghamshire, it goes without saying that there are worlds between their lives and outlook, and, subsequently, a vast disjunct in how they should be marketed to.”

Marketo’s chief aim is to educate marketers through this process of finding more actionable, relevant insights based on aggregate, anonymous data derived from Marketo’s data suite.

Beyond the data side, research topics covered at the institute will include ‘how many marketing touches should occur before a customer makes its first purchase’, ‘the mix of channels and devices brands are using to interact with customers at different stages of the customer journey’, and ‘what percentage of revenue marketing should generate across different industries’.