Is marketing still in trouble?
Marketing is all about the customer being fully represented throughout the company, writes Colin Gordon
Print4 August 2024
I’ve been thinking lately of how to best frame my recent thoughts of what marketing is and what makes it ‘good’ or not. This thinking has been prompted by my having been involved with the All Ireland Marketing (AIMs) Awards and a recurring theme comes to mind: successful marketing has the customer at the centre. Less successful marketing seems to presume on the customer. That’s not to say “less successful” work isn’t well known or recognised. Advertising and dramatic promotions can cover a lot.
This point or theme is all the clearer in my mind after I distill the results of research I recently repeated after an almost five-year gap to understand how marketers viewed marketing and its role in business. The results were recently compared to a parallel study I conducted amongst Australian marketers.
Top four marketing insights
There were so many insights I want to talk about, but I’ll focus on just a couple here for the sake of brevity.
1/ There is a high proportion of marketers who report their own companies as not being very consumer centric.
2/ A high percentage of companies don’t have marketing in the senior leadership team.
3/ Sales and selling are far too far down the order of priorities for marketers; and
4/ Marketers do not have a clear understanding of how to even define what marketing is.
There were some changes in the numbers between 2019 and the most recent study, as there were between the Irish results and those in Australia but that doesn’t change the overall picture.
If you don’t know what it is how do you explain what you’re doing? How will you know if you’ve doing ‘it’ well – whatever ‘it’ may be? How do you work with colleagues? How do you build or even spend a budget, structure a team, develop proper partnerships with agencies or even ensure you’re properly trained.
This is not a question just for big companies with well recognised brands. You don’t have to have a fully structured marketing department to use marketing in your business. You don’t even have to have brands.
Long-term planning
Marketing is all about the customer being fully represented throughout the company.
It’s about long-term planning. It’s about how the company structures itself to continually look for ways to serve the customer.
It starts with understanding what marketing is in the first place. If companies and marketers were clear as to how central marketing was to the long term sustainability of the organisation, to how to properly and fully reflect the customer in all the activities of the company, to ensure that, in as much as possible, everything was being done to help customers buy from the company (making selling easier), then marketing would be better understood, have a longer term focus, would be less preoccupied by communications and promotions, have better measures of performance especially sales.
What marketing represents
Marketing represents the customer in the company – in the boardroom, the customer service department, the finance and invoicing team, the innovation and production functions, the whole company.
If we can’t get these basics right, then marketing’s role in business will (continue to) be diminished.
Read more: “Sell the sizzle, not the sausage!”
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