If there was a univeral truth in the research we did with business leaders it was their extreme distaste and frustration with marketing.
It seemed that the initial first reaction to the question about 'what role marketing played in the success or failure of their business' was almost always a shake of the head, a look up to the sky and then some statement of how the organization was pouring money down a rathole ... usually followed by a specific example of something that happened recently that had a horrible result.
The thing that surprised us was that no other part of the organization was really hit as hard with the disdain that leaders felt towards marketing. So, we of course wondered why and investigated a bit deeper down the food chain, interviewing teams of marketers and others that aligned with the organization. What we found was a full litany of challenges:
- Marketing teams working tactically to 'dream up' campaigns to support sales of lagging products.
- Confusion of when to apply the new rules vs. the old rules.
- Pockets of teams embracing all aspects of social media and viral marketing working in isolation from the rest of the organization.
- Teams focused on brand and awareness programs separated from the rest of the business.
- Product marketers working on persona profiles for new groups of buyers that were different than who they were calling on today.
- Web marketing teams working tactically to update sites that noone visited and not spending any time on identifying which keyword searches their buyers valued.
- Customer and solution marketing teams coming up with new presentations and programs that sold thought leading concepts that only they understood and the company couldn't really support with either a product or sales execution.
In short, a mess. Sometimes all of these problems existed in the same business. And when they did, or even a healthy percentage of them existed, the company's marketing was full of one-off communications with their buyers that served only to confuse the marketplace and the business at the same time. Time consuming, expensive and ultimately fruitless in execution.
The funny thing was that in a majority of the cases, the company culture was really the culprit. Too many marketing organizations were chartered with the mission of either serving sales, building a breakthrough brand or pushing product into the marketplace (and sometimes doing it with these new rules techniques that someone heard about at a conference). The roadmap to failure was baked in from the start!
There's an old statement from David Packard that's often repeated that 'marketing is too important to leave it to just the marketing department'. People laugh at because it seems to put the rest of us on a higher pedestal to ensure that the role of marketing is managed by the experts in the business, not marketing. Well, then step up and smell the roses on your marketing problem because the place to start more often than not is with 'how tuned in is your business'.
- Are you building products that you could, not should?
- Do your buyers like them and talk about them?
- Do people know why they should do business with you vs. your competitors?
- Are you solving a problem that people care about deeply?
- Is your leadership team active in thought leading communities that are relevant strategically?
Marketing teams have their faults to be sure. Trying to be too clever and hit home runs all the time vs. listening closely to their markets is probably at the top of our list. But, when companies, departments, leadership teams or even CEO's start down the path of blame on their marketing departments, we now feel compelled to stop the conversation and ask:
We'll get to that but let me ask you a deeper question ... how tuned in is your business?
