Stayin' Alive...
Good post by Nick Wreden on how marketing departments must evolve to stay relevant within organizations.
The Conference Board found that the top four chief executive challenges for 2004 were top-line growth (52%), corporate agility (42%), customer loyalty and retention (41%), and innovation (31%). By contrast, Booz Allen Hamilton found that marketing executives were focused on branding guidelines (83%), counseling divisions (52%), best-practice sharing (52%), and developing capabilities (47%). No wonder the ANA concluded: "Marketing is disconnected from the CEO agenda."...
The ANA study concludes that "a surprisingly high percentage of correspondents believe [marketing's] most important contributions lie in zones not typically associated with marketing, such as driving innovation and encouraging cross-functional collaboration."...
If marketing wants to reverse its current dive into irrelevance, it needs to once again be seen as the "voice of the customer." Ultimately, that will require less advertising and PR, and more customer communication and collaboration.
Following up my last post on Brand = Connections, I view marketing's function as "connection enablers" within the brand ecosystem, which is very much in line with what Nick writes. Unfortunately, they've been more focused on the components of their small system territory: branding guidelines, etc. More on that later...
"...zones not typically associated with marketing, such as driving innovation and encouraging cross-functional collaboration.." HUH? Haven't they ever heard of product management? This function usually resides within marketing organizations, and is *specifically* tasked with driving innovation and the cross-functional collaboration that supports it.
Seems to me somebody has a very narrow view of marketing.
Posted by: David Foster | November 17, 2004 at 11:23 AM