The 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?
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Mark,
I couldn’t agree more with your assessment about how marketing fails to focus on key goals! I’ve worked as a high-tech product marketer for years, and have encountered more than my fair share of misguided ideas about Marketing.
In January 2007, I published an article entitled, “Navigating Uncharted Territory: How we developed a strategic product marketing role” in Pragmatic Marketing’s monthly magazine. Echoing your sentiment, here are a couple excerpts from it:
“Compared to positions like Sales or Engineering, Marketing is an odd bird. As a way to prove just how different we are from our cubicle counterparts, here is a simple yet effective test: Ask anyone (and I mean anyone) in your company the following two questions about Sales and/or Engineering:
(1) What is the [Sales or Engineering] team responsible for delivering?
(2) How are they are measured?
The responses will be relatively uniform. You’ll hear things like, “Software developers write and test code, and are measured by the quality and timeliness of their delivery.” And, “Sales people are responsible for calling on prospects, closing deals, and attaining or beating their quota.”)
However, ask those same two questions about Marketing, and you’ll find a wide range of answers. “Marketing is … *pause* … well, they write content for our website”, “They generate our leads”, “They’re great on customer calls”, “They plan our trade shows”, or my favorite, “The golf shirt and coffee mug department!”
Granted, Marketing may perform these activities. But do any of them capture the true and complete essence of the role? What is our real purpose? Why is the company spending so much money on this stuff?
The trouble with the outbound role of product marketing is that we have an identity crisis on our hands – we’re misunderstood, misguided, and misaligned – and as a result, great products are either failing altogether or missing their potential. Executives and other members of management have wide-ranging expectations of product marketing that are almost never focused on strategy or the bottom line. Thus, we are usually confined to a tactical role supporting Sales and others, expending enormous resources on too many urgent tactics that are never measured and rarely appreciated. Uncertain about where our “turf” is located, we work in a state of reaction and firefighting, unable to contribute in a way that is meaningful to our companies or our careers. It is time for product marketers to push the “reset button” on our activities and expectations.”
Keep up the GREAT work, Mark!
Sincerely,
Dave Morse
Mark:
Another pearl of wisdom! Thanks for saying out loud what many of us have been thinking all along. It’s a shame that 95% of the decision-makers in business today gag at the prospect of letting their marketing department operate outside their silo – and it’s their loss. *Winning* business – as you’ve affirmed and confirmed time and time again – treats marketing as the art and science of growing business. Unfortunately, most companies focus their marketing efforts on making pretty pictures, spinning logos, and lofty, egregious statements about their leadership efforts (and how many times have all of us marketeers been forced into doing just that, or risk losing our jobs?).
I work for a pretty large casino in Kansas City. I’m soo sending this blog to everyone. They need some words of wisdom!
Hi Mark,
I would like you to elaborate what do you mean “Balkanize”. I am from Balkan area, and I know better than you how it is there and what kind of people live there. I feel insulted because you are comparing Balkan with something that sucks (Your marketing sucks). I don’t think that this is a good idea telling everybody that people from other geographic region of the world suck and that they are “retarded”, like we are some sort of measuring unit for worst sin. Please explain.
Zoran S.
Zoran,
Please rest assured that Mark has nothing against the Balkans, or their people. The term has gained a meaning in English which is defined online in several places.
We are sorry if the use of the term offends you. And we will try to find better terms to use in the future.
MerriamWebster Online Dictionary:
1 : to break up (as a region or group) into smaller and often hostile units
2 : DIVIDE, COMPARTMENTALIZE balkanized; it is full of niches, with different groups watching and playing their own things — Richard Corliss>
or here:
Wikipedia:
Balkanization is a geopolitical term originally used to describe the process of fragmentation or division of a region into smaller regions that are often hostile or non-cooperative with each other[1][2]. The term has arisen from the conflicts in the 20th century Balkans. The first balkanization was embodied in the Balkan Wars, and the term was reaffirmed in the Yugoslav wars.
Sincerely,
Chris Kieff,
Unconventional Thinking Producer
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