Is Marketing Doing The Wrong Job?

Marketing May Be Doing The Wrong Job, But Leaders Can Give It The Right One.

In the way way back, marketers held a coveted role as encyclopedias on their brand’s customers, with a direct line to their needs, wants, and priorities.

And then the internet happened, and scores of executives (some of them marketers themselves) began to utilize the new digital space like a giant billboard. Instead of doing the hard work of knowing their customers, they hired “marketers” to follow them around the internet, chasing clicks, and precipitously cranking buying pressure up to match sales quotas.?

Slowly but surely these marketers, now somehow beholden to the sales department, transitioned from being in the business of customer knowledge to the business of pre-sales, relying on the newest mar-tech to keep up with the demand from the C-suite. Marketing lost its genuineness, its credibility. It didn’t matter anymore what was being said as long as a piece of technology could get it in front of the eyeballs and twitchy index fingers of a buyer?somewhere.?

Marketers were asked to do the wrong job, and they did it, right up until the funnels went dark, the privacy walls went up, and the age of attribution slipped silently into the nevermore.??

Marketers In The Right Jobs

The real job of marketing is to highlight the brand’s reputation.?

Brand?is actionable reputation. The better the reputation, the more value the brand holds. Marketing creates a conversation between a community of people with shared needs and a community of people with shared value. Any tool that facilitates that conversation is marketing. The substance of that conversation is brand.

When marketing tells the truthful, customer-centric story of its brand, it’s working just as it should and just?where?it should in relation to other departments.?Speaking of which – lets pause for a moment to see marketing’s true place in an organization.??

Marketing is not in pre-sales. In the truest sense, sales is actually a form of marketing. So are advertisements. So is social media. So are the chocolates lovingly placed on the pillows at your favorite hotel. So are newsletters. (wink, wink)?

If it lends to the conversation about the reputation of your brand, and specifically whether that reputation is owed to the love and care of your customer, it’s marketing, friend.?

In the post-attribution, highly digitized age, marketing should not take a lower place in the organizational structure. It should actually be elevated to its true role, as the pulse mirroring the heartbeat of your very brand.?

3 Things Needed To Make Marketing Thrive

How marketers do their jobs, depends greatly on the tools they’re given by their employers. In our experience, every marketing department needs these 3 things from the C-suite in order to thrive:

1. Authority: Too often, marketing departments and marketers find themselves handcuffed by those in leadership. If you hire a marketer and have hired them for the right job discussed above, then the first thing they need is authority to make decisions and give insight, not simply aesthetically, but on a strategic whole. Without it, marketing doesn’t get to serve its proper function and simply becomes a factory for “making things prettier.”?
2. Responsibility: Along with authority, marketers should feel a sense of ownership over the brand. In a good marketer, this sense of responsibility helps to deepen their quality of work, as well as empower them to become a better team player.
3. Accountability: With greater authority and responsibility, should come greater accountability. Owners may fear that without attribution, there’s no way to keep marketers accountable. But marketers should be accountable to other metrics like:?Customer Lifetime Value, Retention, Opportunity Velocity, Revenue Churn Rate, Repeat Purchase Ratio, and Net Promoter Score.?

Marketing’s job is to move people – the accountability and measurements that reflect it should be focused on that.?

What's A CEO To Do?

Let us be clear: breaking the dependence on attribution and other performance-based marketing habits doesn't happen overnight. In our experience, it’s taken clients somewhere in the ballpark of 2-3 years to completely overhaul their marketing departments so that they’re serving the correct function for and within the brand. In part, because marketing's realignment will affect every other area of the business. Everything's connected.

Where we will excel is with businesses who are ready to address the root causes of why their marketing team is doing the wrong job and positioning them to do the right one. Those who read this and think, "Our best thinking got us here. We need a container for creating new ways to think about our brand and marketing." When you are at an inflection point between the well-intended past and a differently imagined future, we are your people.

That said, the road to putting marketing in the right seat is paved with many pit stops and there are others who bring additional resources to the table:

• Need to focus more on marketing tactics, like a switch from lead gen to demand gen: Refine Labs?will help you nail it.?
• Need a quick diagnostic that will help you up-level your website copy or communications:?Martin Creative?can make an impact.?
• Need thought leadership, some truly insightful takes on current state of branding, marketing, and communication:?Scott Galloway?and?The Brand Strategy Sprint?will fill your hopper with fresh ideas.

Need more than something short-term, or ready to take on the whole thing from a systemic level?

Then it’s time we finally talked.??

It All Begins with a Little Communication

One of the big breakdowns in marketing doing its job is miscommunication between the C-suite and the marketing team. They simply don't speak the same language much of the time.

Each week I (Nick) offer up flaming hot topics from the week that CEOs and marketing leaders can talk about to surface REAL issues facing businesses today. By bringing marketers into the strategy conversation, they get better. By bring CEOs in the application discussions, they get more connected to how the work really gets done.

From The Zeitgeist: Conversation Starters between Marketers and CEOs hits every week on LinkedIn, and now you can find it here as well.