A conversation at a Marketing Society dinner, in which Mike Cass expressed concern that in many companies ‘marketing’ was becoming restricted to communication, crystallised a thought which hadn’t really occurred to me before…
Getting companies to focus their every activity on creating value by meeting customer needs efficiently is the essence of the marketing principle. FMCG companies and retailers are probably, in general, best at this; finance, utilities, B2B generally worse. But it has always been my assumption that as companies become more ‘marketing-led’, marketers themselves should be becoming more significant, moving up the value/status chain and becoming more visible in top management. After all, who should be leading the charge if not the people specifically trained in the principles and practices of marketing?
But is this actually happening? I wonder if, in fact, far from becoming more important, it may be that in some companies people with the word ‘marketing’ in their titles are being squeezed into a narrower box, forced (or indeed, choosing) to concentrate mainly on communication rather than encompassing the whole spectrum of marketing activities. Not that communication is unimportant. Far from it, particularly now when communication is going through such a massive technological revolution. But it is only one aspect of a marketing-led organisation.
The insight that struck me is that there is a logic to this which has little to do with the skills and competencies of people doing the job. It’s that as the service sector grows more dominant, the range of consumer ‘touchpoints’ broadens dramatically. Leading edge companies like Tesco proudly claim that ‘everyone in the company is customer-focused’. Others may not even use the term ‘marketing’ since the consumer focus is subsumed in the activities of a whole range of people and functions. In a sense ‘everyone is a marketer now’.
Indeed, Hugh Davidson in his 2009 Marketing Society Conference talk, quotes Howard Morgan, Chairman of P&G in the 1960s: “There is no such thing as marketing skill by itself. For a company to be good at marketing, it must be good at everything else, from R&D to manufacturing, from quality controls to financial controls.” And more recently, Graham Mackay, CEO of SABMiller (who is speaking at this year’s Annual Lecture) is quoted in the Marketing Society’s Future of Marketing book: “Marketing must be at the core. Not just a department, but a fully integrated and commercial marketing mindset across all disciplines, from technical to sales to finance and beyond.”
Frontline sales people, customer service people, technical backup, call centres, etc. are all places where the brand is delivered, yet in the typical company, these activities are quite separate from the marketing department – connected, if at all, by personal relationships rather than structural design. Another sign of a disconnect is described in the forthcoming issue of Market Leader: a survey conducted by the Future Foundation found that a substantial minority (40%) of Insight Teams don’t report to marketing but report direct to the CEO or some other senior title.
As a consequence, what might be happening in many companies is that far from being in the management suite overseeing and coordinating the total delivery of the brand strategy, people with ‘marketing’ in their title run the risk of being just one of many functions – communication, important to be sure, but with nothing like the breadth of responsibility the early marketing pioneers originally envisioned. It is ironic that marketers in this narrow communication role are responsible for promising customer benefits that they have no control over delivering.
I’ve touched on this in previous blogposts and would be very interested to know if this reflects a general trend or just an idiosyncratic experience.
Join the conversation on Twitter: mark your tweets #marketingparadox.
sheilahooper @TheMarketingSoc Possibly. But marketers must strive to champion customer and brand to sustain their organisations
thebiznographer @TheMarketingSoc I think it’s true in many organisations; have marketers overlooked a need to market themselves?