We could find no better description of the essence of Marketing than that in the epigraph. Nor is one needed, anyway.
And now a tricky question: Do you think that the ‘marketers’ you employ actually do quite the opposite?
Well, if you come to think of it?
That’s it.
So they are ‘marketers’ in quotes only.
They are rather advertisers. That is, people who spend the money of your company’s shareholders on goods promotion.
In one case study, we’ve already described a simple method of detecting a sponger.
In another case study we discussed that spending money on advertising without numerical payback measurement tools is a sure way to flush it down the toilet.
Consequently: it is 99% probable that the marketers on your staff are merely spongers who are busy throwing your money down the sewer.
We leave one per cent to accommodate such really useful characters as managers of contextual advertising campaigns (if you can measure their efficiency) or those (rent-deriving) persons who use the marketing budgets supplied by vendors.
But even those characters’ activities have nothing to do with marketing: in the first case, it is mainly painstaking technical work by a dedicated professional.
In the second, a mixture of creative accounting and corrupt connections in the media that enable you to actually spend a minimum on advertising for a maximum effect and thus generate quite a measurable profit. The quality of the advertising activities proper counts for nothing – not taken seriously by anybody as a sales booster.
And rightly so.
Let us leave your ‘marketing experts’ alone for now, and look at the head.
There is a 100 years old debate about what the head of a company should be: an expert in the manufacture of its product or a competent manager. A competent manager, some say, can manage anything, for the management principles are the same everywhere.
There is a wealth of reasoning behind both viewpoints.
But neither is correct.
The head of a company should be a marketer, first and foremost.
Of course, NOT merely educated as one.
Arthur Rock, a venture investor of Intel, said that his only unsuccessful investments went into companies headed by experts in marketing or finance.
No, a company’s head must ESSENTIALLY be a marketing professional.
Lots of book about Steve Jobs, especially after his death, are dedicated to studying his leadership skills. Only a great leader could create a great Company, they say.
It’s hard to say whether Apple is a great company (what are the measurable parameters of ‘greatness’?), but there is no doubt that Apple makes incredibly successful products (high profit being a measurable test of a product’s success).
Characteristically, no book about Jobs’ leadership says anything sensible about that ‘leadership’. And no wonder; all the information from open sources indicates that Jobs was no engineer, not much of a manager and quite a mediocrity as a leader (a capable manipulator at best).
But — a marketer of genius.
Henry Ford’s success was not based on the conveyor assembly line, as the general public tends to believe.
Rather, it was based on the strategic positioning of the device he manufactured as a cheap auto for everybody. That was his real and revolutionary innovation.
And the conveyor was a secondary, very technical means for keeping the costs low as required.
Other automotive manufacturers could do without a conveyor perfectly well, as they were making expensive high-end cars. Just like now neither Rolls-Royce nor Morgan use a conveyor – or make waves about it.
To say nothing about the fact that Henry Ford was not the first to invent or use the conveyor line.
Beyond a doubt, Akio Morita was a brilliant engineer.
However, Japan in general and Sony Co. in particular swarm with brilliant engineers until now. And what of that?
And nothing of that. At least nothing good.
Sony owed its brilliant success to Akio Morita being Japan’s first marketer.
And her last one – judging from the sad trash that other Japanese corporations have produced in the last decades and in what hole they (not only Sony) are now.
Alfred Sloan, the actual creator of General Motors Co., was one of the most successful managers of the 20th century.
But, much more importantly, he was an exceptionally far-sighted and talented marketing expert who formulated the principle of an ascending ladder of brands, from Chevrolet to Cadillac.
It was thanks to Sloan’s marketing excellence that both under Sloane and, by inertia, for a fairly long time after him General Motors would earn exorbitant money, to eventually become the world’s first company whose annual profit exceeded one billion dollars.
A billion of those weighty dollars of the 1960s, Carl! Not today’s ones.
And when marketing became the exclusive domain of hired marketers – while the CEO, with his Board of Directors, was interested in nothing but EBITDA and equity price movement, then the notorious badge engineering set in, and the value of most GM brands, once so glorious, was annihilated with the brands themselves.
Summary.
The head of a company must be a marketer in the true sense of the world, focused mainly on forming a USP (Unique Selling Proposition) and a differentiation strategy (which is generally the same but differently worded).
All the rest – ’leadership’, ’team’, ’spirit’, ‘mission’ and the like – is at least secondary, if not bullshit.
Incidentally, we have already described what real marketing looks like as applicable to sales.
The main evil of marketers, even not to mention their sponging and tendency to provoke senseless expenses, consists in their very existence: if a company has a Marketing Division, the top manager is under a terrible temptation to believe that he has highly competent specialists in charge of all the marketing issues.
‘I am a progressive manager’, he thinks. ‘I delegate tasks and powers to those best equipped to address them. And in the meanwhile I’ll do something else, look at our expenses, for example.’
And very few people, like the above-mentioned icons of business, can overcome that temptation.
And even if you are fabulously lucky to have a true marketing expert in the marketer’s position – that will be of no help, even if it’s a Steve Jobs in person.
Why?
Beyond a doubt, before Steve Jobs with his iPhone similar ideas were born in other companies of the industry – but they were all buried.
For an individual marketer, other than the head of his company, has no chance in the intra-corporate fuss against all those technicians, engineers, businessmen and financiers.
The history of the great inventions of Xerox, once a great company, and its current miserable situation are a perfect illustration of this.
From the aforesaid it is crystal-clear what Ultima Consulting recommends that you do about your marketers. Do it now.
P. S. Cynical readers will probably query: ’and what do you (meaning us) think a Procter and a Gamble should do about their dozens, if not hundreds of brands in all sorts of consumer areas and niches? For no CEO will ever cope with such a volume of marketing efforts.
You are right, Comrades.
True, professional marketers can’t cope either – that is why giant conglomerates like ProctoGambles and other Kraft Foods regularly kill their brands, even after decades of exemplary service.
And here’s what should be done: each brand or at least a group of brands in a common goods category should be unbundled into separate companies with their General Directors.
The plants/logistics should be separated into specialized group companies that will work with brand companies on market outsourcing terms.
And everything will flourish.
Incidentally, General Motors worked in a similar fashion as it flourished under Sloane; each brand was a separate company, and the role of the headquarters, GM proper, was reduced to control and funding. And, what is damn specific, each brand would earn good money.
They lacked either imagination or technical capability, limited at the time, to unbundle the manufacturing enterprises from the brand companies. The price of that was colossal additional costs resulting from the inefficiency of their manufacturing business.
But even those enormous losses in their manufacturing units could not keep General Motors from remaining the world’s most profitable corporation.
This is the strength of true Marketing.