…is how few marketers do it.
One of the first things I noticed when I entered business school was how little the marketing they teach there resembles the marketing I knew from my time in business. The more I’ve learned, the more I’ve grown to believe that, at least in the small high-tech startup world that I cut my teeth in, marketing in its full sense simply isn’t practiced.
It’s a pity, too. The science of marketing is a powerful tool for doing precisely what small companies need to do: use minimum investment to maximum effect. And yet many companies decide that they simply don’t have the resources (time/cash/people) to research, develop and implement a marketing strategy. Instead, they live on guesses and intuition and squander the resources they have.
You can blame owners, managers, investors, anyone you want, but I’d argue that much of the blame lands squarely on the shoulders of the marketing professional himself. Quick, what are the Four P’s of Marketing? You have heard of the Four P’s of marketing, haven’t you? They’re supposed to be “Product, Price, Place, and Promotion”. But in many small companies, there is only the One P of Marketing: Promotion. The rest are either ignored or handled by other departments. This is the strategic failure of the marketing organization: ceding critical market-facing decisions to departments that make them based on inwardly-facing criteria.
The result: Operations creates products that are missing important features, have the wrong features, or leave you scratching your head wondering “who would actually buy that?” Pricing policies from Finance that leave money on the table, or that drive customers to the competition, or that are structured in a totally ridiculous manner. Distribution policies that never connect you with actual customers, and incur unsupportable costs trying. Having left three critical sources of value off the agenda, the marketer is left limply holding a glossy ad.
This stems from an underlying operational failure of the marketing organization. Marketing groups often fail to build a process that produces actionable results for the rest of the company. One commonly-heard objection to advertising is that it is difficult to measure (let alone forecast) its effectiveness. Did you know that there are ways to quantify an ROI for an ad campaign with a reasonable degree of precision? Oh yes, there are. The biggest, most sophisticated consumer products companies know how. Your marketing guy can do it, too. Or at least, he should. For a department trained to analyze what people want and how to deliver it, marketers can be surprisingly obtuse about what the left-brain thinkers in their companies are looking for.
Finance wants a financial metric before they allocate a budget: NPV, IRR, payback period something based on more than a wild-ass guess. Operations wants quantifiable, actionable information. They want operational fluency and an understanding of product and cost trade-offs. The sales process has to be shaped to the customer’s buying process, instead of trying to squeeze and stretch the customer to fit a pre-existing sales organization. All too often, marketing is unwilling or unable to provide any of this. All too often, they don’t even realize that they should.
Which brings us to the root of the problem: a competency failure in the marketing organization. No, your marketers aren’t incompetents; they simply don’t have an approach to professional development that fosters growth in operational and strategic competencies. The typical entry level marketing job is focused on work product: ad copy, graphic design, PowerPoint presentations. But while marketing favors creativity, nuance and a vision of the big picture, it also requires solid analytical skills to crystallize dreams into action. Market researchers suffer from a slightly different malady: focused on producing their work product (the research report), researchers fall into the trap of being cut off from the rest of the organization and its needs. They produce data, but not meaning. And many small companies don’t have a market researcher at all.
The result is a vicious cycle: marketers don’t produce strategic value in a form that the rest of the organization can use or will accept. The organization eliminates or reassigns those functions elsewhere. Without a seat at the strategic table, the marketing organization’s strategic competencies atrophy further, driving expectations ever lower.
We need to re-integrate the full marketing function, especially in small companies. Marketing needs to have a seat at the board meeting, and needs to produce value that is worthy of that seat. Vision plus specificity is the full marketing picture. We need our marketers to start marketing again.
