We ran yesterday Part 1 of the interview with Sabrina Horn. Part 2 below focuses on her view of the future of the industry and marketing trends
What she is proudest of
I alluded to it earlier. I think my legacy are all the employees we had at Horn Group through all the years. Before I sold the firm, my HR guy told me we had employed 1,001 people in 24 years across a handful of locations. Many of them have gone on to work for companies like Oracle, for SAP, for some of the hottest start ups and disrupting innovators in the industry, and other top agencies.
I'm so proud of them. I see what they are doing on LinkedIn or on Facebook. These are people who, I think, they learned well, but I also built a culture where I feel like I taught them well. They are out there adding value wherever they are.
I always told them: "Know what you don't know. Never get too big for your britches. Always do your homework. And, ask smart questions so that you are informed.” In an industry in tech where there's so much obsolescence, and not much loyalty to brands or to employers, I am proud how the Horn Group brand lives on and stands for something.
Where tech is headed
I actually think everything goes in cycles. Honestly, I got so tired of big data companies and analytics. Platforms and infrastructures take a long time to build and implement. And they are very hard to sell. I think that we're coming out of that phase, and I think we're going to see an influx of fun, new, interesting, and strategic applications in the cloud. I've been actually talking to some early-stage VCs who only focus on investing in companies making application software.
Their strategy is no more plumbing. They're done with plumbing. It's not about big data. It's about the right data and using that data to do your job better, whether that's in supply chain, logistics, or in finance. I think we're going to see a phase of application software expansion in the next few years.
Like, who cares if it's a lot of data or a little data or whatever? It's about giving you the right data, the right information, and being, functionally, much more rich.
They don't have to be broadly sweeping applications because, as you say, many companies, many enterprises, already have these massive, huge, departmental applications running their groups. Like a product lifecycle management application, right? That's cloud-based. It's so rich in functionality. It's helping a group of people get their jobs done in a much more effective way. But, everything -- the stakes are so much higher, right?
Today, if you were to go and look at new payroll systems, the standard is raised even higher. It will be interesting to see what comes out on the market and what these entrepreneurs and innovators come up with because, in a way, it's like reinventing the HR industry itself and rethinking HR, as an example, or rethinking product lifecycle management and what it should be in disrupting that first and then putting the software on top, not making a business reinvent itself for the software.
Then you take verticals. Like in the education market, higher ed or K-12 and healthcare, certainly, are screaming for it, and utilities and so forth. That will be really, really exciting.
How Marketing is evolving
I have worked with probably over 600 or 700 chief marketing officers in my career. The world has changed so much for them that it's a very difficult job. It's become much more difficult because they have to know so much more about so many different things.
Marketing is much more complicated because it crosses over so many different functions. Just the measurement piece of marketing alone, there's so much to understand. It's a much harder job today than it was 25 years ago, and it's not for everybody. There's a reason why chief marketing officers turn over every two years because it's a really hard job.
The world has also become a much more complicated place to do marketing. I believe we are living in an age of extremism. We have extreme politics; we have extreme violence; we have extreme behavior. Everything is extreme. I think there is going to be a turn back to marketing that is love-based, I will say, as opposed to marketing that is fear-based.
I think the world, companies, businesspeople are all consumers in one way or another. I think the world is just craving for positive marketing messages. I think there's going to be a trend towards that.
It's already starting to happen. We are witnessing this whole new marketing strategy de jour in which CEOs and CMOs are issuing apologies for when they've done things badly. We have to be careful with that because apologies don't hold any water if they're not sincere or if they aren't followed up on. Facebook is apologizing. Uber is apologizing with a big ad campaign. Rosanne Barr apologized, said she would get off Twitter and then went back on Twitter. It's all kind of wearing a little thin. But in general, I think that marketing strategies grounded in positivity and optimism and security will be well received by audiences everywhere.
You only get to apologize once. If everybody is doing it, then it doesn't have as much credibility. It's not just an apology. You have to have a whole “apology strategy”. You have to follow-up with things that substantiate your apology and make it seem sincere.
