The Most Dangerous Term In Business
Monday, February 26th, 2007The most dangerous term in business – marketing department – sounds harmless enough on the surface. In fact, it may even sound like a good thing. The company has a function dedicated to marketing the business: meaning that there is a constant march toward growing the customer base through acquisition and cross selling.
Never mind that most marketing actually sucks and fails to stay focused on those key goals. There is another equally ominous danger here. That is, establishing a marketing department effectively balkanizes marketing ideation and implementation from the development and execution of the company’s core business strategy. This cannot be allowed to happen. Marketing is the process of growing a business. To separate it from the development and execution of business strategy means that you are effectively diminishing the impact marketing can have on the company.
You know how it goes: the top people in the company, be it the president or a management team, develops a plan for how they want to grow the business, and once that is set in stone, they turn to the marketing folks (some think of them as marketing flakes, which they often deserve, because they do not force themselves into the business-building process). The tools and initiatives required to grow the company have to get force-fed into a strategy that has already been signed, sealed and delivered by the powers that be. What an idiotic mistake.
Think of it this way: imagine a general contractor showing up on a vacant lot all set to construct a new building. The contractor knows that he wants to build a 24- story office building that he can sell to a real-estate investor. Is that a strategy? Yes. But the contractor never bothers to hire an architect to create a blueprint for the building he envisions. So he simply lays the foundation and puts up a structure, floor-by-floor, on a haphazard basis, knowing only that he wants to wind up with 24 floors. Without a blueprint guiding his work, the contractor builds a lopsided/miss-matched/leaning tower of Pisa building that no one would ever want to buy, much less, lease space in.
The same thing happens when the architects of business growth (the marketing department) are absent from the development and implementation of the strategic plan. With this in mind, every company and organization should take the following steps:
- Stop allowing your marketing people to be balkanized into a department.
- Instead, make the marketing people part of the management team.
- Weave the marketing people through all of the company’s processes from the beginning
- You may wonder why marketing people should be woven through the HR function. People are the most important asset in selling a business and its products/services. The personalities must be such that they understand the company’s core mission and value proposition
- Make certain that everyone sees marketing as an important part of their jobs. This runs the gamut from the president who must lead the business from the standpoint of marketing its growth every single day in every single way to the manager of a business unit who recognizes that the only way to fuel the company’s growth and to build careers, is to achieve that steady drumbeat of growth, growth, growth.
Marketing is business. Business is marketing. They are one of the same. Almost every company that has achieved enormous growth and served as a model for others – think of Nike, Dell, Polo Ralph Lauren, Sony – has faced the world and conquered it, not just as technological experts, or fashion divas, or superb advertisers, but instead as organizations that placed marketing at the sweet spot of the business and let it permeate out to touch every single facet of the company.
Starting today, liberate “the marketing department”… and let marketing truly flourish.
Mark Stevens
CEO
Tell me how your Marketing is integrated in your business?
