The great marketing paradox

Proper marketing should have a seat at the business strategy table. But do modern marketers get to do proper marketing?

In most organisations, marketing sits at the kids' table. It’s still in the room but not in the right seat to play the role marketing is meant to in an organisation.

Think about it. What should marketing be responsible for in your organisation? The market you are targeting? The very people who choose which companies they do business with? Marketing is where people decide to give you money in exchange for the goods and services you offer. In essence, marketing is really responsible for the majority of a company's success.

But are they really? My experience over the past few decades suggests that more often than not, marketing teams are not assigned the full remit of marketing. As a result marketers still sit at the kids table colouring between the lines, talking performance metrics and brand building amongst themselves.

So how and when did it all go wrong for so many?

Let’s do a quick history lesson to find out.

Think of those B-grade period dramas where lead actors walk through bustling market streets, crammed with extras mumbling "rhubarb, rhubarb" to each other. What they are reenacting really took place. For stall keepers to thrive, they needed to be savvy marketers, constantly evaluating their target customer and assessing the classic 4Ps: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion.

The distinct function of marketing as a focused discipline came to life during the Industrial Era, as companies looked to establish new markets to sell in, known as ‘product orientation’.

The next evolution of marketing leaned into customer through ‘sales orientation’. With the birth of media channels, marketers needed to be a little more clever, segmenting the market to determine who to advertise to. This affected both messaging and media channels they chose. As mass media advertising became accessible to all who could afford it, consumer choice started to ramp up.

At this point, more marketing-savvy organisations, such as Procter & Gamble, began to study markets for opportunities. Through proper investigation and data-driven insights, they uncovered opportunities for new products and categories. They didn’t just find gaps in the market; they analysed every aspect of market participation, including production (Product & Price), distribution (Place), and the proposition (Promotion). An approach well articulated in Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works, written by A.G. Lafley, former CEO of Procter & Gamble, and Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management.

This marked the birth of ‘market orientation’, the modern blueprint for proper marketing.

By the 1960s, proper marketing was thriving in serious growth organisations. Marketing departments had defined roles, and marketing leaders played a key role at the strategic level of organisations, providing insights on market opportunities and guiding new product development. Marketers were now leaders of the customer and the 4Ps, possibly even rubbing shoulders with Don Draper from time to time.

Don Draper - Mad Men

It’s what happens next that I believe unraveled the role of proper marketing in many companies today. And it is ironic coming from me given I’ve spent the best part of two decades working in the space, it was creativity.

There I said it. Creativity unravelled proper marketing.

For those who caught my Don Draper reference, you'll remember that creativity was also the downfall of the great Mad Man himself. As key players in each market caught up with proper marketing and the use of media, differentiation became challenging. Everyone was running similar ads with minimal differences in functional benefits and claims. Companies needed a magic wand to stand out, and that wand was creativity.

This shift transformed advertising from functional demonstrations to 30-second movies and artistic photography showcasing the emotional benefits of being the consumer of a brand.

To support this new direction, companies needed one more element to create distinctiveness. To ensure the scene they set belonged to them and not their competitors. They needed a unique brand identity.

When marketing first sought a seat at the evocative table, it did so with quantifiable data— the stuff that accountants can read, question and understand. When they then started rocking up to C-suite meetings talking about emotive positioning expressed through short films, photography and logos they looked more like new wave hippies than executives.

Some companies rejected the revolution outright, which wasn’t great for them. They stuck to their guns, trying to win through price and occasional new functional benefits.

For those companies that embraced creativity, many saw it as an invitation for personal opinion, discarding data, insights, and customer perspectives in the process. Creativity is a double-edged sword. By evoking emotion, it invites opinion—even if it’s not valid.

And as Mark Ritson preaches (with some expletives) and all good marketers will tell you, “you are not the customer”. Getting enamoured with a creative idea you love doesn’t mean it will resonate with your customer. Too often it’s a sign that it won’t.

Reenactment of Mark Ritson saying: "You are not the customer" without expletives.

So, as the emotional and ambiguous world of creativity has pushed marketing to the colouring-in table, there’s a lot of proper marketing being done by those who are not really marketers. And there is a lot of proper marketing not being done at all.

You’d be surprised how many organisations operate without a proper marketing strategy, making key decisions without data and insights from their market. Many cannot even define their true target segments.

So who’s doing what parts of proper marketing in these companies, I hear you ask?

Well it’s every other department, whether they realise or not. Product and merchandise, manufacturing, distribution, sales, finance, legal and compliance by making decisions that affect the way the brand received by its customers. Like the state of marketing today, many of these departments are specialists in execution in their domain and light in actual marketing strategy capability.

So how do we fix marketing? And why should we?

The second question is the easier of the two to answer. Through understanding the purpose of your organisation, who your target customer truly is and your goals in market, everybody makes better market oriented decisions across the organisation. The business result is optimisation and growth. The stuff that makes everyone happy.

And, to fix marketing?

The first step is a proper strategy— business, brand and marketing tackled together.

Strategy that answers three key questions:

1. Where are you now?

2. Where do you want to be?

3. How are you going to get there?

These are not easy questions to answer internally, which is why I do what I do. I help companies answer these three questions from a holistic perspective. With these answers in place, you will not only build the right capability in your marketing department but also foster a marketing mindset across your organisation.

If you’d like to discuss uncovering the answers to these questions with your organisation, shoot me a message, email, or give me a call.

Cheers, Craig.