Valuable and return business is based on trust. You trust your hairdresser to make you look good. You trust your barista to serve a coffee according to your taste. You trust your mechanic to fix your car and keep you safe on the road. And CEO’s trust their marketing departments to generate more business-quantifiable customer demand for products and services.

Problem is: CEOs don’t trust marketers.

That’s apparent in a new survey by marketing consultancy Fournaise, which polled 1,200 chiefs of large and small companies. Campaign Asia reported the findings, which are your wake-up call ringing from an armada of alarm clocks:

“For B2C CEOs, more customer-demand means more sales revenue. Unfortunately, nearly seven in 10 of B2C CEOs believe their marketers now live too much in a creative and social-media bubble and focus too much on parameters such as ‘likes’, ‘tweets’, ‘feeds’ or ‘followers’—parameters they can’t prove generate more business-quantifiable customer demand for products and services. CEOs regard these parameters as “interesting but not critical”.

For B2B CEOs, more customer demand equates to more qualified or sales-ready prospects in the sales pipeline. More than 70 per cent of these CEOs believe that their marketers are focused on the latest marketing technologies but are failing to deliver the level of incremental customer demand expected of them.

These CEOs feel marketers are too distracted, get sucked into the the “technological flurry and jargon” related to system integration and forget that technology is meant to be used only as a support tool. These tools don’t create demand per se; only accurate strategies and campaigns pushing the right products, product benefits, content and customer value propositions do.”

While the marketing echo chamber continues to discuss secondary tertiary issues like engagement, value of connections, interactions…(Please add your buzzwords here), CEOs get this nagging feeling that marketers love fluff and despise substance. CEOs trust their finance and tech departments more, and the marketing department is as beloved, respected and trusted as US Congress.

Even worse, CEOs believe marketers measure the wrong objectives, focusing on performance indicators that are not theirs, such as prospect conversions and revenue. Instead, marketers should focus on the customer-demand related indicators, which are directly linked to their job and over which they have control.

What to do?

“Marketers should zoom in on a few critical key business performance indicators to precisely measure, quantify and report on the level of customer demand they are delivering, according to the study.

To earn the CEO’s trust and prove that they are solid business generators, 74 per cent of CEOs want marketers to be completely ROI focused.

B2C CEOs want these ROI marketers to be focused on tracking, reporting and boosting four key marketing performance indicators: sell-in, sell-out, market share and marketing ROI (defined as the correlation between marketing spending and the gross profit generated from it).

Meanwhile 85 per cent of B2B CEOs (and B2C CEOs in prospect-driven industries) would like ROI marketers to focus on tracking, reporting and boosting prospect volume, prospect quality rate, marketing effectiveness rate (defined as the percentage of marketing spending that directly generated prospects) and the business potential generated by marketing.

“Marketers will have to understand that they need to start “cutting the rubbish” if they are to earn the trust of CEOs and if they want to have a bigger impact in the boardroom,” explained Fontaine. “They will have to transform themselves into true business-driven ROI marketers or forever remain in what 65 per cent of CEOs told us they call marketing la-la land.”

For too long, marketers have seen data as an aid to justify media spend and overall marketing investment. This harsh wake-up call should spell an end to this justification era. Marketers need to use data to drive, determine and justify their marketing and media plans.

What are you going to do? Wake up or hit the snooze button?

The marketing world is filled with words like fans, followers, likes, fans, loyalty, engagement, commitment, participation, community, and so on and on and on and on, giving every marketer the false hope and idea what marketing should be about.

It would be beneficial for all stakeholders (clients, agencies and customers) to start with the assumption that nobody cares about what we do. This might make us feel depressed, less important and kind of useless. Still, at least we’re starting from the right point and it helps us focus on our work in the right way.

Don’t be sad: Nobody cares what anybody does.

Nobody cares about the 500+ TV channels, the thousands of magazines and radio stations, the millions of podcasts and gazillions of websites. There’s so much stuff out there, we don’t even have a tiny chance to consume 0,0001% of it. All this media is like the Atlantic, engulfing people with content wave after wave, competing with anything else that’s interesting, useful, or entertaining. With so many temptations surrounding us, seeping out of millions of screens, we should never assume anybody will notice anything we do. Oh, and don’t even assume anybody does care. Don’t kid yourself.

It gets worse: People don’t care about brands.

As a brand, you don’t want people to think about your brand too much. A strong brand will help people make quick, easy and gut-driven purchase decisions. If you’re an Apple fanboy, you don’t think about Dell or HP. It’s going to be Apple, no matter what. Strong brands solve problems. When your favorite beer is Guiness, you don’t have a beer problem. When Acura is your car brand, you don’t have a car problem. No thinking required, no decisions. No worries about price, quality or reviews.

The myth of brand loyalists

Another marketing myth is that the ultimate goal is to create brand loyalists and permanent relationships. People might ‘like’ your brand but they ‘like’ their dog 10,000 times more. For sure, people don’t love brands. They love their favorite pillow 10 million times more than your brand. Using the language of deep human emotions for brands trivializes those feelings. Brands are desperately looking for those lovers, those special ones. If you base your brand on loyalists, you will have a small party in a studio apartment in Manhattan. Brands are built by millions of light customers who buy the brand once in a while.

It’s easy to market to people who actively seek you out and use your product/services frequently. It’s hard to market to people who don’t know you, who don’t care about you, see you frequently. And, don’t get me started with the new buzzword “audience”. An audience goes to a Coldplay concert or watches the latest Spiderman movie. Advertising doesn’t have an audience, waiting for the show to start.

It gets worse.

The vast majority of advertising produced is horrendous. Go to some sad cable channel and try to stick around for the commercial breaks. Try not to change the channel within seconds. Good luck. It’s mental and creative pollution. Another proof point for people not to care about advertising.

That’s a good starting point.

At the bottom of enmity between strangers lies indifference – Soren Kierkegaard.

It’s easy to be loved, even easier to be hated. But it’s really hard to overcome indifference. You can get 1% of potential customers engaged and create participatory communities for them. It doesn’t help you when it comes to the bottom line. The real goal should be to engage the remaining 99% and that means fighting indifference.

The majority of efforts on social platforms is now limited to activating the 1% and going to church afterwards, praying the 1% will spread and amplify the word. It’s good, but not good enough. It’ll earn you brownie points but doesn’t improve business results. Unless you’re happy talking to a minority, we need to focus mainly on the 99%.

You will be judged how you engage the indifferent masses, the ones that don’t care. It starts with answering the most important questions: Why should they care more about you than all the other gazillion options they have? What’s the point? What’s in it for them?

Marketo posted this infographic, visualizing the difference between right brain vs. left brain marketing. As they write: “Psychologists and personality theorists have long believed there to be differences between the right and the left side of the brain. The right side of your brain is responsible for creativity, while the left side handles the details and implementation. The left side is analytical while the right side is artistic.”

Frankly, the infographic feels quite dated. If you’re pure right brain or left brain marketer in today’s market environment, you will fail. Pure art with no science attached to it lacks effectiveness. Pure science with no art lacks emotion and passion. You need both sides of the brain to succeed.

The whole advertising industry is embracing Big Data. It’s the new black of marketing. I’m a big fan of testing and optimization. We finally have readily available data in real-time – how can you not incorporate Big Data into your working practices and developing a culture around test and learn? The real success stories in Silicon Valley and on Madison Avenue are exactly doing that. And any advertising agency worth their salt has to follow that path.

There’s one thing optimization can’t do.

Coming up with a radical, game-changing solution to a problem. An idea that is entirely different from any which is currently in play. A disruptive innovation.

To develop this disruptive idea, you need a vision. Testing won’t ever come up with disruptive ideas. Focus groups definitely not. Surveys? Please.

When you need disruptive innovation, you can’t rely on science. You need to rely on art, embracing a bit of chaos. It’s not either science or art. Agile, organizational cultures needn’t preclude discordant ideas. In fact they should thrive on them. The companies that will flourish are those that encourage divergent, not convergent thinking around a powerful vision, and then test and learn as (and not before) they build and execute it.