Marketing - The Neglected Child

Marketing - The Neglected Child

Recently, Coca Cola decided on scrapping the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) role after the incumbent retired. Also, the same day, I read some interesting finding that rarely do CMOs become CEOs. That got me pondering. So folks, will you answer me? What do you think of the Marketing team in your company? More often than not, ‘marketing’ is viewed as the glamour function with visions of various media, celebrity models, graphics, creatives and all sorts of brouhaha associated with it. However, from where I see it, I would beg to differ. There is a general lack of respect for marketers. That’s why, I’d go on and like to call Marketing as the neglected child. Especially in the B2B enterprise services industry, it’s probably one of the necessary evils that an organization needs. So why is it that marketing is looked down upon?

For starters, marketing is one department that always seeks money. Most of this is for branding, advertising, creating assets, images, graphics etc which are often hard to link to an increase in sales. Also, most of marketing activities require time to yield results. And again, it’s very difficult to attribute these results directly to marketing. A certain level of cadence as well as consistency of messaging is vital. Typically in a B2B enterprise services company, consistently capturing the mindshare of potential consumer is the key. And this requires patience as well as money. This leads to internal folks perceiving marketers as extravagant spenders on vague stuff often failing to understand the key concepts underlying marketing.

Call it an occupational hazard or trait, but marketers almost have no direct touchpoint with the end customer. It’s always a sales rep, account executive, customer success & project managers or the CEO that interact directly with customers and prospects. Marketing’s role is to create that funnel that will make prospects ready for such conversations or to prepare internal teams to face them. Despite being responsible for all outward/ customer facing messaging & presence of a company, you will hardly see any marketing personnel interacting directly with them. Even in key strategy meeting and board discussions, marketing gets the least priority as operations and finance and even recruitment heads get attention. Marketing is often viewed as a money-guzzling execution medium to satisfy the needs of these teams.

Internally, project (operations) and sales team are often the glamour boys at events & awards due to successful go-lives or a key client acquisition. On the other hand, the Admin, IT, HR and Finance teams are popular internally because of their roles which necessitate interaction with employees. Its only marketers that are left in the lurch, neither known internally nor talking to outside world. In fact, they are often looked down upon as ‘liars’ who are not ‘practical’ by project teams and ‘ineffective’ by sales teams. Since companies cannot count on their marketing departments for direct results, CEOs instead turn to operations and finance to increase profitability by cutting costs, optimizing utilization or reengineering the supply chain to grow revenues. Marketers are thought of as folks with no special skills who just go around work using their own hunch without any rationale to their methods. The best a marketer can get is that often people confuse them for ‘sales’ and associate frequent customer facing travel.


While these are indeed the stark realities of a marketer, I’d like to put in my two cents to see if this can help their cause. Marketing as a department is highly strategic, cross-functional, and bottom line oriented. Digital provides this opportunity today with marketing being galvanized by lot of tools, data & tech. In fact, most departments work in siloes but marketers talk to operations for showcasing case studies, to product teams for providing market trends that shape a solution, to finance for managing costs, to sales for providing leads and to HR for internal branding & recruitment campaigns. Even the senior leadership issue statements or quotes that are drafted & framed by the marketing team. Marketing has to keep in touch with not only every aspect of their company but also the keep eyes and ears on the various happenings in the industry. In fact, I’d go a step ahead and say that a marketer needs to even look at macro-economic factors and probably try and connect that to some of the services the company has to offer. It’s a highly creative function which requires its personnel to constantly innovate, iterate, think on their feet and present the company to the external world.       
                           
                                                     *****
  

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