Is marketing playing with just one club?

The practice of marketing is being diminished and increasingly misunderstood by an over-emphasis on communications, says David Whiting

When did marketing become conflated with marketing communications? Did it just creep up on us, or was it always the reality, at odds with the theory?

The theory of strategic marketing and the marketing mix are still being taught to huge numbers of future marketing managers in business schools and other institutions around the world. But the likelihood is that most of them will end up in a marketing communications role, irrespective of whatever job title they come to hold.

This phenomenon was alluded to by Mark Earls when he quoted Regis McKenna, who '… repeatedly complained that the marketing function has shrunk to mere communication management'. In one sense, every element of the marketing mix has to communicate, but the reduction of marketing to mean media communication is the crux of the problem.

In the early days of modern marketing, as practised by the big fmcg companies, theory and practice were more closely matched. Brand managers did indeed have a great deal of influence over the product and price, as well as promotion, and some impact on place – particularly point of sale. To this day marketing is practised in most fmcg companies much as one would expect from the textbook, as it is in other sectors, including many retailers and some service organisations.

Marketing communications is part of successful brand building and plays a vital role at both a strategic and tactical level. Its management has become increasingly complex over the years, with choices to be made in optimising medium, message and creative vehicle for a target audience. But why has it become so dominant in recent years?

First, perhaps, there has been a renewed emphasis on communications since the dawn of the digital age. In particular, social media offer a potentially game-changing challenge for marketers, empowering consumers while offering new ways to engage with them. The increasing necessity to interact with consumers is only just beginning to be understood.

REVISIT FUNDAMENTAL TRUTH

Second, there is the silo nature of so many marketing activities, due in part to the growing levels of complexity in managing them, that can serve to reinforce the perceived tactical nature of marketing. Businesses need to revisit the fundamental truth about marketing, as stressed by Peter Drucker and Theodore Levitt, that it involves the whole organisation becoming customer-focused.

Third, there is a risk that marketing is increasingly reflecting the widely held view in both society and other disciplines that it is concerned solely with selling, advertising and promotion.

At worst this is reduced to the pejorative idea that it is concerned with 'flogging you things you don't want'. Countering this perception is an immense challenge for the profession.

Finally, the spread of marketing beyond a few sectors appears to have stalled. As Hugh Davidson has pointed out in Market Leader, 'whole industries with a marketing bypass remain'. They have adopted many of the trappings but never understood its essence.

Marketing roles in B2B and service organisations, in SMEs, utilities and the public sector, often do not involve much more than marketing communications, or a subset of it. Perhaps the most visible example is in the financial services industry, where the practice is often a parody of the concept.

It is not so much that, as Regis McKenna implies, marketing functions in established marketing-led companies have shrunk to control of one executional element, but that in other sectors it has never extended much beyond the use of 'one club'.

In these sectors, marketing as it is practised not only conforms to the common misunderstanding of the discipline, but reinforces it. The confusion will likely lead to a diminution of its influence in business and society.

Contrast two very different approaches taken within the Marketing Society to sustainability. On the one hand, the publication of an excellent paper How can marketers build sustainable success? in February, which describes case studies deploying the strategic marketer's toolkit and based upon years of work. On the other, the Marketing Society May Day Alliance, on the basis of a short breakfast event in September 2009, came up with a preferred phrase for use in all sustainability communications, ignoring all the previous work done by marketers.

Marketing should be at the heart of the business strategy that determines how the company optimises the (long-term) return to its shareholders, by fulfilling customer needs, and meeting all the requirements of stakeholders. Far too often it is seen as a function charged with building sales tactically via communication platforms.

The disjunction, however, between the theory of marketing absorbed by future managers, and the reality most of them will experience, is a critical issue for the profession as a whole.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Whiting is a marketing consultant and trainer.

[email protected]