A few years ago, I crossed the great divide from agency to client to become CMO of a large consumer electronics business. It felt like the chance to finally put all the advice I’d been giving my clients over the preceding decade into genuine action.
The board had its ups and downs of working together, but it swiftly became apparent that some things were strictly off limits for marketing to truly get involved in. Pricing, for example, was set largely on a cost plus basis, rather than through consumer demand. Essentially, the product managers were challenged to find as many supply chain economies as they could, which in turn would set the price offered to customers and eventually consumers.
Products and services were defined less by need and more by competitor benchmarking. The rule of thumb was to find either 20% more features than the market leader for the same cost, or the same number of features for 20% less. And distribution was strictly the realm of the sales teams, with a simple remit to go as broad as possible.
So with three of the four p’s seemingly out of reach, surely at least the sizeable marketing budget would lend itself to the team creating some breakthrough promotion. Except when I discovered that circa 80% of the budget was earmarked for listing fees and such like which were clearly non-discretionary (not to mention non-creative).
Perhaps my experience was extreme, but I’m willing to bet that most marketers have come across similar issues at least some of the time. Mark Ritson talks about the communification of marketing becoming endemic in our industry, where even the fourth ‘p’, promotion, is reduced to a series of tactics as opposed to a consistent business driven strategy. I’ve seen plenty of first hand evidence to back this up too.
Perhaps, provided the job is being done by someone, we shouldn’t worry about whether it’s marketing or anyone else doing it. Except that the key skills of marketing people like curiosity, empathy and creativity are multiplied when focussed on the entire marketing mix rather than one part of it. Narrow their scope, and you reduce the effectiveness of the bits they have left.
I recently ran the 2022 edition of the APG’s Strategy for Solving Client Business Problems course and was delighted at how keen the delegates were to get stuck into the non promotion parts of the syllabus. They were all good at it too and in my opinion would have lot to offer their clients beyond the narrow confines of the next brief. But they all equally felt they didn’t have the authority or the opportunity to go there. The sad fact of the matter is this likely mirrors what their clients felt too.
It’s easy to criticise from afar. When I was a CMO I know I didn’t do enough to champion marketing’s contribution to the wider strategy of the organisation either. The reality is that we are no longer automatically asked or consulted on many business decisions that historically would have been squarely within marketing’s domain. Clearly, if our discipline is to thrive, we must grow our influence within our organisations. That starts, as it always does, with our own behaviour and forcing ourselves to be more front footed, to be more pro-active and even more awkward than before, refusing to take no answer. It’s a slippery slope if we don’t.