 Marketing
the Marketing Department
by Malcolm Wicks
Imagine. You’ve spent weeks “negotiating” the marketing budget
and you have finally got one approved, albeit a bit less that
you would like. Now at last you can devote your time to getting
on with some real marketing. Sound familiar so far? What happens
next will also be familiar in many organizations.
Business is not going as planned--cuts have to be made. Down
from on high comes the message “cut the marketing budget and
grow short term revenues and profits.” A chorus of “oh no,
not again” plus various expletives, emanate from the marketing
department.
“How are we expected to do quality marketing when our budget
gets cut?” becomes the phrase on everyone’s lips.
The next question in marketing is, “Where do we cut?” Most
often there is no guidance from senior management, so the
common first reaction is to try to do the same things but
just reduce the costs.
Once any obvious savings have been made, a common target is
market analysis and the measurement of marketing programs.
After all, devoting most of the money to the actual demand
generation programs is the best way to increase short-term
revenues--isn’t it?
Oh dear. Unfortunately business is still not going as planned
and further cuts have to be made. Guess where. Once more marketing
is top of the cutting list.
A demoralized marketing team let out even more expletives
and wrestle with where to cut. By this stage a big percentage
of budget money has already been committed and often the only
option is just not to spend any more money at all.
Suddenly, once well-rounded marketing programs begin to suffer
from anorexia. Some still manage to weakly deliver, others
don’t.
Then, once again, it’s spring, the birds are in the air and
a new optimism strikes the marketing department. Budget negotiations
start soon and they are confident that they’ll be able to
get the funding that they need for the next financial year…
What a terrible picture of marketing. But how many marketing
people can honestly say that they have never had painful experiences
like these?
In my experience, not many. The two questions are (a) Why?
and (b) How can the budget pains be avoided, or, at least,
reduced?
Why?
In a recent survey by the University of Warwick, CEOs in the
UK were asked this open question: “If business was under pressure
which budget would you cut first?”
Having read this far I’m sure that you already know what came
up on top. In the number one spot was Marketing and Advertising,
with 23%, followed by Human Resources at 18%, and Training
at 13%. R&D and IT came in at 9% and 8%, respectively.
What is it about R&D and IT that make them almost four times
less likely to be cut first than marketing? The answer starts
to appear when the same CEOs are asked the next question:
“Which are the necessary investments for long term growth?”
Training and IT come in at more than 90%, HR and R&D at 70%+.
And marketing?
The 58% result tells us that CEOs do not appreciate, nor perhaps
understand, the value of marketing. No wonder that we have
been suffering death by a thousand budget cuts!
How to Market Marketing
Most of us in marketing spend a lot of time focusing externally
on customers. We identify targets, build appropriate marketing
programs to deliver our messages to them and get them to buy.
We also try to get our organizations’ product or service regarded
by our customers as an important part of their business or
lifestyle. When we do this successfully we make the sale over
the competition, usually at healthy margins too.
A similar approach needs to be adopted internally. The “customer”
is senior management and the “competition” is the other departments
that want funding. As a good marketer, of course you’ll treat
the other departments as “partners” rather than competitors.
After all, they might share some of their budget if handled
correctly. The next budget round could be very different.
Marketers have all the skills to do a great job on “marketing
marketing;” they just need a little help to get started.
The Internal Customer
Having identified that the internal customer is the CEO and
senior management, the next step is to understand what they
care about. The simple answer in today’s tough environment
is…avoiding getting fired--and thus delivering financial results.
According to Business Week, the fundamental task of a CEO
is simplicity itself: “Get the share price up. Period.”
So, no more telling senior management about
how difficult it is to measure marketing activities. No more
soft presentations on awareness, brand, image, loyalty, advertising,
sponsorship etc. Relate everything to the goals of senior
management and keep things as simple and short as possible.
Senior management will not know what hit them--but they’ll
like it.
The marketing plan
How many pages in your marketing plan? The more pages you
have the less likely it is to be read.
Several years ago I worked for a large IT company and, after
a lot of hard work, my marketing team and I delivered the
48-page plan. At a subsequent team meeting I asked my staff
who had read the entire document. Not a single hand went up.
The only one who had read it was me, not even my boss read
the whole thing though. The days of plans that need to pass
the weight test are definitely over.
A good marketing plan should be no more than about a dozen
PowerPoint slides that can be easily read, understood, and
shared widely. It must support the overall business strategy
and contain simple success metrics that link to the financial
goals of senior management.
Keep the number of marketing programme low and incorporate
all of the necessary components in each program. No separate
programs or plans for PR, advertising, printing, etc. Internal
customers are not really interested in how we marketing types
do things; they just focus on the results.
External customers
How you ever been stuck in a meeting “discussing” something
for hours but finding it difficult to come to an agreed decision?
Here’s a simple way to win the argument--sorry, discussion.
Start your next sentence with “When I was talking to customer
X they told me...” It works almost every time.
What about asking your customers what they think of your marketing
plans? What about testing all major decisions against these
two questions: What will customers think of this? How will
this action help customers?
It puts a very different perspective on many things.
External customers are key to helping senior management
meet their financial goals. They should therefore be the base
of all metrics used to track the performance of marketing.
This makes it much easier for senior management to understand
the value and impact of marketing activities.
Finally
I want to end with one final thought. One way to measure your
success with these ideas is if you find it easier to get and
retain budget funding.
I’d like to suggest that you try something else too. Take
the two questions used by Warwick University and ask your
CEO and senior management to answer them now. (If you just
skipped to the end of this article you’ll have to read the
whole thing to find out the questions). Go back and ask the
same questions in six months and 12 months. A great example
of customer-driven metrics!
About the Author:
Malcolm Wicks is the founder of Three
Step Consulting who specialise in helping clients implement
joined up marketing and to become more customer centric. He
is the principle architect of the Decision Director Methodology
used to help organisations make good, consistent decisions
and has wide experience in connecting web site content to
Marketing strategy.
Malcolm can be reached at: +44 (0) 118 989 1107 malcolm.wicks@3sc.co.uk
www.3sc.co.uk
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