As published in Marketing
News, October 11, 1993
By Michael Render
Perhaps the most important problem with marketing today has barely reached the consciousness of the profession. While most discussions of marketing relate to research, advertising, sales, etc., little attention is given to the engine of marketing: the collection of human minds that drive the marketing system in any organization.
Neglecting this critical aspect causes much of marketing’s potential power to be diluted and diffused to the point that, within most organizations, it is only reaching a tiny fraction of its potential.
In the ideal, marketing is the organization’s vibrant central nervous system, functioning in dynamic harmony. It uses every possible method—qualitative and quantitative, formal and informal—to interpret the world outside the organization.
It efficiently distributes necessary marketing intelligence to every part of the organization. It effectively analyzes and interprets the data and uses brilliant creativity to help develop and position the organization’s overall product. It sets comprehensive tactics and strategies. It develops and distributes compelling communications to convey its message and uses strong relational skills to set up infrastructures outside the organization to move the product successfully.
It real-world organizations, such a dynamic marketing system is difficult to find. There may be elements of such a marketing system—good research analysis, ad people, public relations personnel, and salespeople—but something is missing. Marketing is in pieces—disconnected.
The problem has several sources. Integration is lacking on several levels. (As used here, integration does not relate to integrated marketing communications [IMC], but something much broader and deeper.)
First, there’s a lack of integration within individual marketing people. Perhaps more than any other discipline, marketing requires the use of at least three distinct skills and ways of viewing the world.
Quantitative/analytical skills, creative skills, and interpersonal skills are all required. This is where the problem comes in. Today, many people tend to have strength in only one of these areas. As far as marketing is concerned, quantitatively oriented people tend to gravitate to marketing research and analysis. Creative people tend to lean toward advertising, and interpersonally oriented people tent to move into sales.
As a result, each of these areas often has deficiencies. If the research department is excellent at crunching numbers but lacking in other areas, research is often off the mark; not focused on real problems, not focused on the real questions, and not creative in analyzing the results in a meaningful way.
If the ad people are creative but disregard other disciplines, advertising may be cute and award-winning, but off base because it does not tie to a central positioning strategy. If salespeople rely on interpersonal sales skills exclusively, they may be ineffective by not using a creative analysis to attack the market. If marketing management focuses entirely on interpersonal management skills to the detriment of creative and analytical skill, the organization’s central marketing strategies will be lackluster and adrift.
Second, there’s a lack of integration among different areas within marketing. There can be amazing void of communication and teamwork within a typical marketing/sales group, partly because of these polarized skills. As just one example, the sales side simply may not understand formal market research and may be predisposed against it.
Third, there is a lack of integration between marketing and the other major functional areas of the organization. To be an effective central nervous system of the company, marketing must be well-connected to all parts of the organization.
As an example, marketing and R&D (or whoever in the organization develops new products) should be a unified team. A fully integrated marketing department teaming with R&D should combine full knowledge of market conditions and desires with full knowledge of new product development possibilities, creatively using turning them into successful products—and the very foundation of good marketing is product.
Without this marketing connection, R&D often spends invaluable resources making minor changes and variations which, too frequently, have little real meaning to the marketplace. Marketing is then asked to sell these “improvements” or variations. Meanwhile, the company may become vulnerable to being leapfrogged by an upstart competitor making a more significant innovation.
The first step in reconnecting marketing is finding and developing more marketing people skilled in all areas. It is simply a myth (especially in 20th century western cultures) that all people must specialize, or that they are destined to be only “left brained” or “right brained.”
Many of the successful people of the past were multidimensional. Thomas Jefferson was a writer, statesman, musician, architect, farmer, businessman, and inventor. Leonardo da Vinci was a scientist, inventor, engineer, and painter.
Today, because of the knowledge explosion, we tend to think that everyone must be a specialist. Although there’s a place for specialists, the idea can be carried to extremes. We don’t have to hold all the knowledge—that’s the role of books and information data bases—we only need to have assimilated a base of knowledge and know how to retrieve more detailed information. Also, even functional specialists should be well-rounded in the cognitive approach to their subjects.
Connected marketing also will require stronger leadership. Many companies have incredible potential but are stagnating simply because of leadership that does address the human issues related to the engine of marketing.
Top marketing managers must strive to be fully integrated themselves, recognize the value of all faces of marketing, and begin to mold the marketing/sales group into a true team. Finally, the CEO must do a better job of building the entire organization into a team.
Hints of the power of connected marketing can be seen in many of the companies that have emerged into successful powers in the last 20 years. Wal-Mart, Apple, Federal Express, and many others are probably examples of initial success due to one fairly well-integrated person who was, in effect, the entire marketing system.
As the size of the organization increases, the difficulty of integration increases, of course, but examples still exist. The success of GM’s Saturn division has been credited largely to a unique team approach which helped integrate the various sides of marketing and R&D.
At present, marketing has tremendous unrealized potential. Only connected marketing will start to realize this power.