When I first conceived of this series I was a bit more dejected than I am this minute. I think reading Beyond the Brand this weekend is cheering me up. But still it's obvious that there is a funk in marketing.
A sense of marketing in crisis is not consistently felt across the sector, or even within larger, individual businesses. But there is a general feeling that the function has emerged from the dotcom bubble and the media downturn in this decade with less boardroom power and fewer, high-flying practitioners.
[...] The paradox is that while clouds may hang over the reputation of marketers, all the study’s respondents found that growing top-line revenues is a clear priority. - Financial Times, People! There's a Problem with the Marketing (sub required), via NevOn
It's not just an internal crisis within the industry, but rustlings and doubtings on a personal level as well. I am starting to understand how lawyers must feel. I still don't know too many marketers in the bottom of the pool jokes, but perhaps they're coming.
The reality is that many people have begun to feel that marketing is mere propaganda. - Beyond the Brand by John Winsor (the book has nothing to do with branding!)
Last week Steven Weber in his talk that the pharmaceutical industry spends four times more money on marketing than in R&D (and that's an R&D intensive industry). That blew me away. But it also made me wonder what folks define as "marketing" these days.
The Conference Board found that the top four chief executive challenges for 2004 were top-line growth (52%), corporate agility (42%), customer loyalty and retention (41%), and innovation (31%). By contrast, Booz Allen Hamilton found that marketing executives were focused on branding guidelines (83%), counseling divisions (52%), best-practice sharing (52%), and developing capabilities (47%). No wonder the ANA concluded: "Marketing is disconnected from the CEO agenda."... - Nick Wrenden, FusionBranding blog
Hmmm, I guess I'm more suited to being a CEO than in marketing. Perhaps it's time to just tell people I'm an entrepreneur.
The ANA study concludes that "a surprisingly high percentage of correspondents believe [marketing's] most important contributions lie in zones not typically associated with marketing, such as driving innovation and encouraging cross-functional collaboration.
Huh? This is marketing (people shoo me away when I say that product management really is marketing.) I guess I don't need to remind anyone of my background, but just in case this is a snippet of the bio I submitted to the New Communicatons Forum (great conference with superb taste in speakers; ok, disclosure coming: I'm on a branding panel ;-))
... spanning roles in product development, product management, and strategic marketing. Her enduring philosophy is a brand is conceived well before the product and it acknowledges the innate human desire for belonging and meaning.
What did I mean that the brand is conceived before the product. Heck, it's conceived before the lab starts tinkering too. It starts in the early deep hanging out and deep listening of your prospective customer base. Yeah, marketing precedes innovation.
The relationships formed with your market will lead you in the right direction during the discovery and exploration phase - but the pre-product development phase is usually given short-shrift. And continuously keeping those relationships alive and flourishing just for the sheer information provided into the mindset of your market - and not to sell an iota of next quarter's stuff is practically foreign. Unfortunately most marketers are too impatient for success. There are exceptions.
Nike is a great example. When they expanded into the golf market in 1995, adding golf apparel, balls, and equipment, they called upon their successful formula of participating in a market at a level of deep understanding. It took Nike four years to find their center of gravity, but by 1999, they got all the pieces put together and became the leader in a very competitive marketplace. Nike entered the market quietly. They first developed a deep dialogue with club pros and top players, highlighted by the $100 million sponsorship of Tiger Woods. Once they had the right relationships in the market, Nike went on a learning quest. They not only wanted to get to know the players but also their needs on a deeper level.
Things started to click in 1999, when the winner of the British Open won the tournament in a pair of Nike shoes. Next, in 2000, Tiger Woods dropped his relationship with Titleist and played very successfully using Nike's new golf balls. The final piece fell into place when David Duval won his first major tournament in 2002 using Nike's new clubs.
All the hard work and deep dialogue around the needs of golfers began to pay off, as Nike became a resounding market leader in a short period of time.
And, gee, you thought the swoosh logo alone would carry the day with golfers. I'm sure this appeared to be an overnight success story - as most do.
I once worked at a company where the CEO spent two weeks tweaking the new company logo (I bet you can guess what era that was). There were certainly more important things to get done. But if he insisted on working on marketing issues, I couldn't have been happier if instead he had an interest in talking to real live prospective customers and understanding their world from their perspective.
Now you are thinking "yes but, that would only work for Nike" or some similarly wealthy multinational with heaps of resources at its disposal...then consider for a moment perhaps this blog. To be continued...
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