Marketing’s image problem

In prepping for the CMO Council talk some weeks ago, I centred on a theme based on marketing’s image problem. It struck me that most non-marketers have a pretty poor regard for marketing, somewhere in the region of estate agents, lawyers and car salesmen. 

What also struck me was the irony in the situation. Jeez – if marketers can’t fix their own image problem what chance do their employers/clients have.

When I met Hugh McLeod in 2006 he used this analogy for traditional marketing:

Imagine you’re at a party. A man comes up to you, but instead of introducing himself, he yanks your head back, pulls your jaw down and looks at your teeth. “I’M A DENTIST!” he explains.

(I’ve subsequently plagiarised this analogy in a White Paper and the book.) 

In a party context, most normal people would rather be offered some peanuts and engaged in polite, if trivial, conversation. Why can’t marketing be like this? Why not engage people in a conversation? If you are interesting then they will respond in kind. You can move to a business conversation later, once social niceties are satisfied.

Hugh recently revisited the subject even more succinctly:

(Full post is here.)

The real problem for marketers is the awful image they have within their own firms. At the CMO Council Summit in Berlin, I was amazed at how many of the speakers criticised marketing and marketers (i.e. the audience!) for their lack of ambition and poor perception. “Blowing up the balloons,” was how Malcolm MacDonald termed it. 

Marketing should be the second most important thing a firm does, after serving customers. If marketers are blowing up the balloons, then someone else has to do the effective, productive marketing, typically the sales teams and channel partners. Sales people can spend 40% of their time creating marketing collateral – 80% of “official” collateral created by marketers never gets used.

How are you perceived within your organisation? Are you a future board member or strategic thinker? Or do you blow up the balloons?

New year, new budget, old habits

What’s your rationale for determining your marketing budget this year?

The majority of us marketers look at what we spent last year, make a few tweaks, and submit the not-much-changed plan for approval.

So, did last year’s plan work well for you? Did it tangibly increase revenues, or generate better quality sales leads? The best measure for marketing success is to ask the sales team whether they think marketing is doing anything for them. So go on, ask them.

In fact, since Influencer50 started surveying sales teams as part of our kick-start influencer engagement programmes, I’ve been startled at the appalling scores marketing departments get by the sales teams. The average score for usefulness of marketing to sales efforts is less than 50%.

And don’t give me that “Oh marketing is complicated and we have to invest in awareness” claptrap. If you can’t justify marketing in terms of sales (or sales support) then why are you doing it?

With my Influencer50 hat on, I’d say that you should instead map out who and where your key influencers are, then organise your marketing activities around them.

But it doesn’t really matter what rationale you use to plan your marketing this year. Just make sure it’s not last year’s plan. If last year’s plan didn’t tangibly and positively affect sales, what makes you think the same plan will work this year?

CMO Council talk transcript

It’s available for unrestricted download here…

The paper on the Insanity of Marketing, which I referred to, is here (one-time registration required, or just login).

CMO Summit thoughts

Last week I was at the CMO Summit, run by the CMO Council Europe, in the splendid Hotel Adlon Kempinski in Berlin. I’ll post some of my more detailed thoughts on specific presentations shortly. But the overall impression is that the quality of presenters and attendees was very high. From Malcolm MacDonald to David Haigh of Brand Finance, the first day was top notch, and I learned a lot.

I’m usually very sceptical towards the value of conferences, as they tend to be vendor-sponsorred pitching opportunities. But at the CMO Summit there was very little pitch, and it created a rare occassion for CMOs to gather as a community.

I gave an after-dinner talk on why marketing is insane and what to do about it – transcript to be posted soon.

The lasting impression of the Summit is that I had planned to be tough on marketers and marketing – “you’re insane…” and all that. But more than a few presenters beat me to it. There is an apparent consensus amongst commentators on marketing that there is a lot of nonsense and poor practice in the industry.

Will, or can, marketers change old habits and mindsets?

Brands are an outcome

I’ve just finished the major part of the book we’re doing, published by Butterworth-Heinemann. Hence the long gap between the last post and this. So expect more content from now on.

Anyway, one of the research themes we look at is the influence of brand on decision making. Did you know that there is no research available that supports the assertion that “building the brand” leads to more sales? None.

In simple terms, this means that any money pumped into branding is unlikely to translate into business success. This, presumably, would include the hilarious London Olympics 2012 pink splodge. Spookily, Seth Godin comments on more or less the same thing here.

But if brand is not a prerequisite for success, what is it? Firstly, brand is a consequence of success. Google is successful, so its brand becomes trusted. Secondly, brand is a measure of trust and expectation, not awareness. Anyone can get awareness is they spend enough. Ford is well-known – does it have trusted brand? (Answer: not if business success is the measure.)

Finally, it’s interesting to see how fragile a brand is, only as robust as the product or service quality it represents. In the UK, the banks are taking an absolute pasting on their charging regimes, and it seems that the US banks are having a few problems too. The trust with which we approach banks is being severely dented. And I predict that the first bank to promise no more unfair charges will be deluged with new custom, irrespective of their current brand status.