Marketing is a Company Wide Function

By Melanie Houghton-O’Connor

I recently virtually toured an international technology company’s office in Dublin. All the functions were laid out in open plan style together, with bright colours, stimulating environments and espresso coffee machines.

“And down there is the marketing department”…

The marketing department was on its own, way down the corridor, away from the common communal working space, no beanbags or coffee machines to be found, just desks in a room that was separate from the rest of the office space. 

I thought it odd and I wondered how this might be a reflection of this companies view of its marketing crew and more than that, how this might be reflected in the attitudes towards marketing in other organisations?

It turns out the marketing function is under-utilised in many Small and Medium Sized Enterprises or SMEs (Walsh & Lepinski, 2009). Marketing is an important driver of sustainable competitive advantage, yet, it still does not have a seat at the strategic decision-making table in many SME’s, or when it does, its purpose there is misunderstood. 

Out of date, is how I would describe the old school siloed approach to marketing. Seeing it as its own separate engine divorced in many ways from the rest of business operations. This includes an often unrecognised bias towards more immediately tangible assets within the company.

This can be amplified by a marketer whose career progression has been streamlined in just the marketing lane so much as to develop a schema, or, getting caught up in the pretty picture, the engagement, the noise, the vanity metrics and forget to link their activities back to the business’s key objectives. Therefore, fundamentally misunderstanding what the role of a marketer actually is.

It’s not exactly the managing director nor the marketer’s fault. There has been less study done on the marketing function in SME’s than has been done in larger organisations (Simpson et. al, 2006). So, it’s no wonder SME companies find themselves at a loss at how to best utilise the skill within their organisation for maximum benefit, or how to ensure hire the right person/people to drive their marketing function.

Case Study: One SME I’ve previously consulted with, had just come off the back of hiring a marketing consultant from a top consulting firm to increase new business and all they got was a lot of noise that made little difference to the bottom line.

Months later, still no growth achieved, in I come, 28 years old at the time, in my bright coloured high heels and skinny jeans and design a strategy that brought in more new business for that company in 2 months than they had for the previous year and increased their annual profit margin by 500%.

It’s not business school, 20 years of experience, or a marketing degree that taught me that, in my mind it’s just common sense:

Know your unique value proposition, what you do better than any other business out there, what you can currently achieve with your existing internal resources and know intimately who your best customers are, then, you’ll find that the strategy that best aligns with that will be quite effective.

From this, I would suggest that both a new breed of marketer and a new mindset of marketing is needed to succeed in this increasingly ‘customer centric’ global marketplace. Now, more than ever, a company’s attitude towards marketing and the type of marketer it hires is going to show in a company’s profit margins (or lack thereof).

It has been shown that there is a positive link between an SME’s financial performance and its approach to marketing. (Simpson et al, 2006). Therefore, it’s up to the head of the marketing department to ensure that the marketing function’s value is correctly understood within all departments in the organisation and with key decision makers.

There are two main factors that can impact the influence of a marketing department in an SME. These are: A) the type of market (and its consumers – the voice of the customer) the business operates in and B) The firm’s orientation, (Walsh & Lepinski, 2009).

The Voice of the Customer:

Customer demands and expectations are continually increasing. To keep up with these changing needs and expectations the customers point of view to be ‘top of mind’ in the marketing function. You need to listen to what customers say to you, about you and promote the marketing department as the voice of the customer within the organisation to be considered at all levels, including the strategic level.

Why? Poor customer experiences resulted in an estimated $83 Billion loss by U.S. enterprises alone, each year, because of defections and abandoned purchases, and people are twice as likely to talk about a negative experience than they are a positive one. (Qualtrics, 2021).

The Market Orientation: 

There are many options for an organisation’s orientation, or the overall focus of the company including a sales orientation, product orientation, production orientation or what we are discussing here, a market orientation.

The market orientation is defined as a business philosophy that focuses on identifying customer needs and wants and meeting them. (Market Business News, 2020). This is different from the conventional approach to marketing, in the conventional approach, the business priorities the promotion of existing products by establishing features that can be key selling points (Corporate Finance Institute, 2020).

This conventional approach is an ‘internal out’ perspective of the marketing function: to promote goods and services to the market. However, the market orientation approaches the marketing function from an ‘external in’ perspective and as Marketing Strategist True Tamplin stated:

“Market orientation is absolutely essential in today’s saturated world. Focusing on the customers’ needs and creating organic brand loyalty is the foundation for lasting, consistent growth.” (as cited in Market Business News, 2020).

However, there is one limitation to a solely market driven approach, this is that the organisation gets so focused on solving customer problems that it loses sight of its own core value proposition. Therefore, a market orientation should be established with a healthy respect for the organisation’s goals, resources and capabilities along the way.

Every function is a marketing function:

Regardless of the orientation that best suits the company’s strategy, every function that an organisation performs can be seen as a marketing function as it directly links back to a customer’s view of the organisation, and a person’s purchasing decisions.

If marketing presents who the organisation is to the world, then the way that an organisation does everything from respond to an email, to handling online criticism can be seen as a marketing opportunity.

For SMEs, economy of resources is much more important, therefore, marketing efforts must me more targeted. The effectiveness and efficiency of the marketing function should also be considered:

• Marketing is ineffective when its viewed in isolation from the rest of the business.
• Marketing is inefficient when its is about making noise, rather than driving key stakeholder value.

Therefore, when the marketing view (or the desire to meet customer wants and needs) is integrated through every element of the business’s operations, the efficiency and effectiveness of the marketing function and budget can be best implemented.

Let’s Consider Marketing as a Part of the Bigger Picture:

Take Social Media Marketing for example: it can seem tough quantify the benefits of daily posting on social (unless you can directly correlate new customer acquisitions from social channels), and yet we know our business likely wouldn’t be as sustainable long-term without it. The company and the marketers’ attitude towards these skills determines how effective the marketing function is perceived to be and how much value is attributed to it.

When you consider this marketing activity, through the view of the market orientation and consider the voice of the customer in your approach to social media, posting on social becomes one of many ways to directly speak to and meet customer expectations and therefore, contribute to the business in a way that can be measured more tangibly.

The New Role of the Marketer:

The new role of the marketer can be considered from a strategic, tactical and operational standpoint within the organisation and should be equally represented on each level. Therefore, marketers need the ability to integrate up to the strategic level and all the way down to the individual communications and campaign levels.

The marketing role needs to be properly understood within the organisation that its role is about more than ‘making noise’. It must have accountability to produce tangible returns for the company.

When I first started out in this profession in 2012, I didn’t know that this was ‘marketing’. I didn’t know how to define what I was doing for the businesses, I didn’t know about strategic marketing, product marketing or brand marketing. All I knew is that I was getting results. I was making them more money, increasing their profits and attracting new business.

After all, isn’t that exactly what the skill of marketing should be aiming for? 

Therefore, there is further education required for the wider business community and especially for SME leaders to understand the role that marketing will take on into the 2020 decade and beyond. It appears this philosophy is catching on:

More and more CMOs (chief marketing officers) are being given profit focused objectives which has dramatically changed from their old ‘brand ambassador’ role within the company (Brenner, M., 2017).

The New Marketing Function:

The tide isn’t now just starting to change for businesses and the marketing profession, it’s been changing for quite some time. The marketing function and process needs to take a strategic position within the company, being an advocate and internal voice for the company’s external stakeholders in particular the voice of the customer.

One challenge for SMEs is in attempting to apply models that work on larger businesses to the SME environment, without adapting the model to suit the nature of the smaller organisation. This results ‘in a square peg in a round hole’ scenario or something that looks impressive on paper, or attracts a lot of noise, but doesn’t necessarily correlate to positively impacting the businesses key objectives.

Therefore, more research needs to be conducted on the effective execution of the marketing function within SME’s to best identify a new ‘best practice’ for the continually evolving function within an ever-changing marketplace.

But, giving the marketing department a voice on each level of the organisation from strategic to campaign and operations would be a good place to start.

Achieving Cross-Functional Collaboration:

In my opinion the best way to start is to open up the silos and encourage cross functional communication and collaboration to promote the marketing function within the organisation. Let’s bring the marketing function back in from the cold and integrate it in with the centrefold of business operations moving forward.

I look forward to the days where the voice of the customer and the marketing function are represented at the strategic level of SMEs, not just as a novelty, but as a core consideration in the development of the company’s strategy.

The emerging new role of marketing needs to be seen in the value that it brings to the table and its purpose evolved from ‘just making noise’ to the value it can truly add in determining sustainable competitive advantages, meeting customer needs better than the competition and adding shareholder value. Then, I believe the marketing function will be elevated in status from just a ‘side action’ to an integral part of the sustainability of a company, long-term.

by Melanie Houghton-O'Connor, 18/1/21

References:

Walsh, M.F. and Lipinski, J. (2009), "The role of the marketing function in small and medium sized enterprises", Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development, Vol. 16 No. 4, pp. 569-585. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1108/14626000911000929 (accessed: 17.1.21)

Simpson, M., Padmore, J., Taylor, N., Frecknell-Hughes, J. (2006), “Marketing in Small and Medium Sized Enterprises”, International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour & Research 12(6). Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51014424_Marketing_in_Small_and_Medium_Sized_Enterprises (accessed: 17.1.21)

Market Business News, (2020). What is market orientation? Definition and Meaning (online). Available From: https://marketbusinessnews.com/financial-glossary/market-orientation-definition meaning/#:~:text=Market%20orientation%20is%20a%20business,in%20order%20to%20be%20profitable. (Accessed: 18/1/21).

Corporate Finance Institute, (2020). What is Market Orientation? (online). Available from: https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/strategy/market-orientation/ (accessed: 18/1/21)

Qualtrics, (2021). What is the Voice of the Customer (VoC)? (online). Available from: https://www.qualtrics.com/uk/experience-management/customer/voice-of-customer/ (accessed: 18/1/21)

Brenner, M., (2017). CEOs to Marketers: CMOs need to focus on revenue growth (online). Marketing Insider Group. Jan 11th, 2017. Available from: https://marketinginsidergroup.com/strategy/cmo-revenue-growth/ (accessed: 18/1/21).