A Manifesto for Marketing – What’s ails the profession and how to fix it.

To paraphrase Charles Dickens, these are the best of times for marketing, and these are the worst of times for marketing. On the one hand, marketing has never been more important for companies as they struggle to grow and differentiate themselves from competitors. On the other hand, the value of marketing is being called into question in the executive suite. Marketing needs to reinvent itself if chief marketing officers want to gain a seat at the executive table. If marketing does not reform itself, it will die a slow death by a thousand budget cuts.

By Mohanbir Sawhney

http://www.cmomagazine.com/read/070104/manifesto.html

What Ails Marketing?

Marketing faces two key crises—an identity crisis in defining its role in the organization, and an accountability crisis in demonstrating the value of marketing to the organization.

The Role of Marketing: Marketing often plays a highly circumscribed role of marketing communications in companies. Few marketing organizations are meaningfully involved in formulating corporate strategy, designing offerings and managing partnerships. My colleague Phil Kotler recently told me about a conversation he had with a vice president of marketing at a major airline. Phil asked the VP what he did in his job. Did he control pricing? "Not really," the marketing VP replied. "That’s the yield management department." Did he control where and how often the airline flies or the classes of service it offers? "Not really—that’s the flight scheduling department." Did he control the services that the airline provides its customers on the ground? "Not really, that’s the operations department." So what exactly did he control? "Well," he told Phil. "I run advertising and the frequent-flyer program." I suspect that this is the case with most companies, with marketing becoming synonymous with marketing communications, and that, too, after the fact when products have already been developed. There are a few exceptions in the consumer packaged goods arena, but even there, the rising power of retailers and the shift in marketing dollars to promotions stands to make marketing the "discipline of cents-off coupons," in the words of my colleague Don Lehmann from Columbia.

The Value of Marketing: Marketing faces a crisis of accountability as CEOs and CFOs legitimately question the return on investment (ROI) they get from their marketing investments. Not much has changed since John Wanamaker, founder of the first department store, made his famous statement: "One half of my advertising budget is wasted. The trouble is, I don’t know which half." According to David Pottruck, CEO of Charles Schwab and a former marketing head, CMOs need to speak the language of CEOs. "Almost all CEOs are focused on revenue growth," he says. "If you don’t grow your revenues, you are sunk." According to Pottruck, while CEOs can clearly see the benefits of paying salesmen more for what they sell, the value of marketing is often not as clear." If CMOs are unable to quantify the value of marketing, marketing budgets will inevitably get cut, and marketing spending will gravitate toward short-term demand generation initiatives at the expense of brand and relationship-building initiatives.

Transforming Marketing: Marketing has failed to live up to the exalted position that Peter Drucker gave it more than three decades ago when he declared, "The business has two basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs." To claim the strategic high ground, marketing needs to reinvent itself. Here is a seven-point manifesto for chief marketing officers to transform marketing:

Point One: Market the marketing department.

An Indian proverb says, "Under a bright lamp, there is great darkness." Marketing departments try hard to market the firm’s offerings to customers, but they often do a very poor job of marketing themselves internally to the leadership team and to other departments. In my conversations with developers at technology companies, I have found that very few of them have a clue what marketers do at their firms. It is the CMO’s responsibility to communicate the "value proposition" of marketing to everyone in the organization. To do this, CMOs need to clearly define how marketing adds value to the company. They need to identify a few key, high-level marketing priorities, and they need to link these priorities to the company’s growth and profitability objectives. And CMOs need to learn the languages of CFOs, CEOs and R&D.

Point Two: Change the marketing mind-set.

The traditional marketing mind-set is a command-and-control mind-set that relies on selling to passive customers whose demand and perceptions can be influenced and manipulated. In an age of "Information Democracy," CMOs need to evolve their organizations to a "connect and collaborate" mind-set—where the company collaborates with customers to create, deliver and share value. Cocreation of value with customers requires creating a shared vocabulary, shared interests, shared platforms and shared trust with customers.

Point Three: Earn credibility through customer expertise.

Marketers often complain about the lack of authority and lack of influence over their colleagues in engineering, operations or finance. The simple fact is—nobody will give you a seat at the table; you have to earn it. And the best way to gain power is through knowing your customers better than anyone else in the organization. Customer expertise will provide marketers with the courage of conviction they need to promote their point of view to other parts of the organization. Remember that you cannot outsource customer understanding to market research vendors. You have to get in front of customers and get inside their lives. As a Punjabi proverb states: "If you want to see heaven, you have to die yourself."

Point Four: Focus on the customer experience.

Too many marketing organizations limit themselves to the products and services that they make, without realizing that it is the total customer experience that matters most in differentiating yourself and delighting customers. Focusing on the customer experience requires marketers to think holistically about every single customer touch point and every stage in the customer lifecycle. It also demands a total quality approach to designing and improving the customer experience. It is the CMO’s responsibility to ensure that every employee in the firm understands how he or she impacts the customer experience. And it is the responsibility of marketing to orchestrate the customer experience across all channels, partners, business units and stages in the customer buying cycle.

Point Five: Think in process terms.

Marketing has traditionally thought of its activities in terms of the infamous four P’s (product, price, promotion and place). This is a functional view of marketing activities, and it fosters the mistaken impression that marketing functions are independent silos. Instead, marketing activities should be conceptualized as a set of logically related value-creation processes. Drawing insights from the business process reengineering literature, I believe that marketing needs to be organized around processes, not functions like channel marketing, audience marketing or product marketing. These value-creation processes include the processes for understanding, defining, realizing, delivering, capturing, communicating and sustaining value. Each process has a set of activities and deliverables, and these processes together constitute the new work of marketers.

Point Six: Create an ROI culture.

Marketing must conform to the adage, "If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it." CMOs need to promote a return on investment mind-set that should permeate every marketing initiative. Marketing initiatives need to be derived from marketing objectives, and marketing initiatives need to be evaluated on a set of objective metrics. In simple terms, marketers need to define where they want to go (objectives), how they will get there (strategy), what it will take to get there (resources), and how they know if they get there (metrics). Creating an ROI culture does not mean every marketing initiative has to be quantified in terms of incremental revenue. Marketers can rely on intermediate metrics that follow customers through the "hierarchy of effects"—from creating awareness to changing perceptions, to creating demand, to enhancing loyalty and retention. More difficult but equally important questions that CMOs need to tackle include ways to optimize marketing spending across channels and establishing the financial payoffs of longer-term marketing investments.

Point Seven: Embrace technology.

Marketing is the last bastion for manual work in the enterprise. Most functions in the enterprise have been automated, including operations, finance, human resource management and sales. But marketing activities largely remain ad hoc and manual. This situation is beginning to change with the development of exciting new technologies for marketing resource management (MRM), marketing analytics and customer intelligence gathering. CMOs need to embrace these technologies to improve the visibility of marketing operations, to improve the efficiency of marketing processes, and to institutionalize best practices that have been encoded in software and tools.

I believe that marketing is the most fascinating area of management, because marketers need to combine qualitative insights and intuition with quantitative analysis and rigor. I also believe that marketing is the key to continued business success in a competitive world. However, marketing needs to change with the times if it is to stake its claim as the function that creates the most value for the organization. As marketing leaders, CMOs need to combine their passion for customers with a business value mind-set, creativity with rigorous analysis and brand-building strategies with hard-nosed tactical execution. In the words of Lee Iacocca, marketing must "lead, follow or get out of the way." CMOs must step up to the challenge or risk becoming figureheads in their organizations.

Readers Viewpoint
Marketing/Accountability
Accountability in marketing, which starts with the ability to track advertising, may well turn out to be one of the
hottest topics in the coming year. The research for a white paper we’ll be releasing in about a month addresses this very topic. I’ve concluded that this problem is much more serious than most folks realize.

What may be most critical for advertisers to realize is the day when the CEO will realize that there are two camps in his/her organization:

The "trackers" — usually the people who implement online ads, because nearly 100% of those ads — banners, search, contextual links, etc. — are trackable back to media source, creative, offer, price, etc.

The "trackless" — usually the offline folks who have never figured out how to track web orders and leads that come from offline ads such as TV spots, magazine ads and direct mail.

What’s going to happen when this becomes clear: increasingly CEOs will move budgets into trackable vehicles.

But it doesn’t have to be, and shouldn’t be, that way. Part of our forthcoming white paper "All Roads Lead to the Web" discusses a patent-pending technology we’ve developed (iFactz) that can track all forms of offline advertising to the web and overnight enable the "trackless" to become "trackers."

As you quoted John Wanamaker, if John were alive today, he might say: "I know half of my web leads and orders come from offline advertising; I just done know which ads."

Excellent article, right on point. Thank you.
Irv Brechner
CMO
SendTec Inc.

Agree, but….
Speaking as a non-marketing executive, I agree with your points, but would have prioritized them very differently. From my experience the best marketing programs come from marketing people who understand, speak for, and forecast the behaviors of their customers. These attributes, which you do discuss, should be the first focus of anyone trying to improve the view of marketing within the organization. Until this is done internal marketing and any attempts at measuring value are meaningless.

Marketing, done right, helps to insure that we build the right products, that people know about these products, and that they are interested in buying them. It required knowing the customer to such a level of understanding that you know what they want before they do, and that you can accurately predict their interest (or lack of same) in radically different offerings.

The solution cannot be that we phase the marketing function out of the corporation. This would be tantamount to saying that we will no longer listen to our customers. That can only lead to failure. Marketing needs to be great for the company to succeed.

***********

What’s Wrong With Sawhney’s Thinking: A Real World Response

Marketing professionals take on Point One.
Come back next week and join the discussion of Point Two.

http://www.cmomagazine.com/read/070104/point_one.html

Mohanbir S. Sawhney
is the Tribune Professor of Technology and the Director of the Center for Research in Technology and Innovation at the Kellogg School of Management.
Point One:
Market the marketing department.

An Indian proverb says, "Under a bright lamp, there is great darkness." Marketing departments try hard to market the firm’s offerings to customers, but they often do a very poor job of marketing themselves internally to the leadership team and to other departments. In my conversations with developers at technology companies, I have found that very few of them have a clue what marketers do at their firms. It is the CMO’s responsibility to communicate the "value proposition" of marketing to everyone in the organization. To do this, CMOs need to clearly define how marketing adds value to the company. They need to identify a few key, high-level marketing priorities, and they need to link these priorities to the company’s growth and profitability objectives. And CMOs need to learn the languages of CFOs, CEOs and R&D.

Zubin Bamji, Marketing & Brand Officer for the American Red Cross

I agree, but we usually lack the resources or time to mount an effective internal education campaign…we’re so focused on the external audiences. we also tend to be a bit arrogant about our role in the organization, as though everyone should know and understand how important we are. that being said, I don’t think there’s one way to communicate value. I view this holistically and utilize specific communication tactics depending on the activity I want to communicate. one very effective option, besides regular meetings with key staff and influencers, is the intranet and other internal communication devices.

James Richardson, CMO at Cisco Systems.

I agree. In the past, marketing at Cisco was more externally focused on communicating with customers. While that’s still a top priority for us, we realized that we needed to get better at communicating our value internally within Cisco.To that end, we now have better aligned our goals with the internal stakeholders using quantifiable metrics and online dashboards to communicate our marketing activities and provide accountability for our programs.Not only does it help us market our accomplishments, it also makes our own marketing employees feel more appreciated and valued.

Carole Johnson former Executive vice president of marketing at Monster.com

Marketing should be well connected to every organization in the company, and the business results of what are produced should be communicated.

George Sokolowski, CMO at TJX Companies.

I mildly disagree with Mohan. I think the best way to market the marketing department is through active collaboration with other areas, showing some humility and showing the rest of the company that what you’re doing is adding value to a product. Your cost is priced into the product, and your efforts will bring more customers to the table.

Readers Viewpoint
Point One: Market the Marketing Department.
Step one of the marketing department attaining support and "full-member-status" recognition privileges within the leadership team and the company – right down to front-line people – is the gaining of the CEO’s commitment and support that the function of marketing is the fountainhead of the company’s future. Without a CEO who believes this, sit back and watch the frustrations pile up.

A CEO "saying" marketing’s role is "important" without demonstrating his or her commitment to driving the directions of the company using sound marketing-driven strategies is a useless and hypocritical venture. The CEO must believe it and get the message (with marketing’s help) to the rest of the leadership. Anything else will be viewed as a jockeying for status on the part of the CMO.

Having said this, the chief "customer" of the marketing department is the company’s Chief Executive Officer. His or her responsibilities – driving critical CEO needs – must be fully understood, even anticipated, by the CMO and the entire marketing department. Without this "customer for life" relationship with the CEO, anything the marketing department comes up with is simply going to fall on deaf ears.

Moreover, the CEO must be willing to advocate the marketing department’s role – to the board of directors – to the leadership team – and to everyone else in the company. To get there, the CEO must demand levels of marketing performance that earn that advocacy. The recent popularity of performance accountability – "ROI marketing" – is a symptom (not a cure) for the fact that marketing departments are just not understanding and anticipating their "top customer’s" needs – those of the CEO.

Professor Mohanbir S. Sawhney did not fully emphasize this aspect of the equation – the discovery and understanding of CEO needs. He, instead, advocated a push mentality that would have CMOs identify their own high-level marketing priorities, and then linking these priorities to the company’s growth and profitability objectives. Adding to the Indian proverbs the professor cited, I’ll venture to add one of my own – of an origin I can’t recall. "You can’t push a rope."

This applies to almost all prospect and customer relationships – but for the marketing department’s "top customer" – the CEO – it is especially critical. Why is market research to determine needs less important when it comes to the CEO? By demonstrating to the CEO that his or her needs are of interest, understood – even anticipated – the CEO will "pull the rope" to elevate the marketing department to its earned status and contributions within the organization. Once the CEO is demonstrating this, the rest of the company will see the benefits of "rope pulling" for themselves.

William Thompson
Principal
The Thompson Group