Repeat after me: marketing is an investment

Bill Hick’s infamously said that if you work in marketing or advertising, you should, “kill yourself... you're the ruiner of all things good... you are Satan's spawn, filling the world with bile and garbage... kill yourself…” Steady on Bill. Perhaps a little harsh there. Regardless, you are still a legend in my book. RIP.

After 25 years in marketing, I have spent tens of millions of other people’s money on marketing. I have run my own businesses where I have spent my own money on marketing, which was educational. Spent is repeatedly and incorrectly said, ad nauseam when what I mean is invested. My university's business school told me that if I chose marketing as my profession, I should "wear armour". For most of my career, lots of people (often pale, male, and stale) have told me that marketing "is just a cost." Regardless, I have mentored and encouraged people who want to go into marketing to do so.

Why? Because in its purest form marketing is about understanding the market and the customer. Peter Drucker put it perfectly. He said, "the aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him [or her] and sells itself." As the Worshipful Company of Marketors puts it, "Mercatura Adiuvat Omnes." Marketing benefits everyone.

The product or service sells itself. On that basis, marketing is not a dirty word, or the brand merchandise team or the words and pictures-collateral function, or what we do on the “nth floor.” It is a whole business philosophy of profoundly understanding what a customer wants, even when they do not know it themselves. Marketing defines how a company can satisfy or delight each of them.

Companies spend billions on promoting substandard products or services with a shoddy customer experience that would never just sell themselves. In other words, one big scam. Thomas Merton, US theologian, poet, author and social activist, nailed it when he said, "There is no evil that is not fostered and encouraged for the sake of making money. We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible."

However, if you create a brilliant product or service addressing a real customer need with a superb customer experience that genuinely lives up to its promise, it will sell itself (with a little help from marketing. As an aside, "if you build it, and they will come" rarely works as a business strategy. People do need to be aware of you before they will buy something from you. I call this zero-marketing strategy Field of Dreams management).

Hundreds of companies right now are doing staggering amounts of damage to their brands as they slash marketing talent and marketing budgets as an unaffordable cost. The brand harm will not be immediate as companies save cash. It will happen in the years to come as top talent rejects companies that misbehaved towards their marketing departments, budgets and brands during the crisis. The long-term effect of underinvestment will start to show through greater consumer disloyalty as people shop around. New entrants and aggressive competitors, especially online, will certainly have taken advantage of the silence of established brands. There is too much hard evidence, academic research, and real case studies for anyone to question this.

In reality, there is so much marketing we can do today that is effectively ‘free’, so the only investment is time and people. In the digital economy, you can use personally relevant (and consented) email, public relations, content marketing, social media, podcasts, video, webinars, online events, and surveys. It is a pity it has taken a crisis of pandemic scale to wake companies up to these opportunities that have been resisted by non-marketers (and some marketers) for years, i.e. "it is not what we do around here".

That said, I think I understand why marketing has had a bad reputation. It comes down to three overlapping factors: ignorance, execution, and barriers.

Widespread ignorance of marketing (or management, business, or strategy more broadly) is endemic in business leadership. People who are good at one function (e.g. sales, finance, manufacturing) rise to the C-level without understanding how company ecosystems work. They often do not know how diverse people are motivated and how customers think or how markets operate. They rely on their political skill, self-promotion, biases, and former glories in one function to get them through. As in leadership, so in marketing.

If you study a BBA or MBA, the following subjects are often core; Accounting/Finance, Business Development (Sales), Economics, Entrepreneurship, HR, Operations, R&D/Innovation, Strategy and Marketing. To run a significant business, you need to understand all aspects of how organisations operate. One of those critical pillars to understand - as determined by all leading business schools and practitioners - is marketing.

Poor execution is rife in marketing. Marketing staff are paid, media is booked, agency fees are paid, and accolades are claimed. But the acid test of selling a higher volume of a product or service that satisfies customers is often not met. Early in my career, one honoured marketing star must have picked up every marketing gong there was. In every company in which they ran marketing the number of products sold either flatlined or fell.

For most of my career, finance directors have told me they do not know what they financially get back from marketing. Disappointingly I have been told the same from the marketers themselves. Both sides are doing a poor job.

You will often have the prosperous merchant, and early proponent of marketing John Wanamaker quoted at you. "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the trouble is I don't know which half." If someone ever uses that finance has lost control, and you have the wrong marketers. As someone who has run my own businesses and invested my own hard-earned cash, my thought to both is often, "you bloody well should know."

Why is there such poor execution in marketing? Possibly one of my more controversial opinions is that enthusiastic amateurs disproportionally populate the profession. There is no real barrier to entry on becoming a marketer.

Just to stress again. There are many genuinely brilliant self-learnt marketers, for or with whom I have worked, and from whom I have learned a lot. But they have all accepted that marketing is sophisticated and complex expertise that must be acquired.

Accountants, lawyers, or medics all have professional entry requirements, but to be a marketer is to get a job as one. The only real qualification to be the most senior marketer is to have been one step down the ladder before. I have known of C-level marketers who pride themselves of having no formal marketing experience. These "I'm not a marketer" pretenders often loudly proclaim this as a virtue to anyone listening, harming the whole profession for everyone else, confirming the bias of anyone who already has a dim view of the expertise. You would not let someone operate on you as a surgeon if they were a mechanic. Why would you expect someone inexperienced in marketing to be a good marketer?

Because, here is the rub, marketing is a science, an art and an investment philosophy. By investing in the right marketing, you get to understand markets, customers, and competitors better. It is a virtuous feedback loop of constantly creating, testing, selling, listening, and improving. You get to develop better products, services and experiences that sell themselves. These will be more closely aligned with markets and customers, overcoming competitors and new entrants.

Most importantly, you generate income with a proven return on your investment. 10:1 is my track record and rule of thumb. If I do not know that ratio when I arrive at a company, I will find it through hell, high water, or a Byzantine accounting system. When I miss 10:1, some other idiot has grabbed the steering wheel.

The right marketing is talent-led, evidence-based and data-driven, behaviourally informed, tested & learned to death, with a proven financial benefit. It is not based on uninformed opinions or “what we do around here (plus or minus ten per cent)”. Even creative or artistic aspects of marketing can be tested and measured to a high degree. We now know, more than any other previous working generation, what works and what does not. This does not mean you can create a guaranteed success or "make it go viral." There are too many externalities and variables. But you should be able to say, without fear of contradiction, "that none of the money I invest in marketing is wasted. I also know what return on investment I have generated".

Marketing needs to learn how to market itself better. It needs to raise its game, qualification-up, use data better than the next function while understanding finance and accounting and ultimately prove an ROI.

When done wrong, marketing is spent on polishing brass. Marketing, when done right, is the best investment in gold. Repeat after me: marketing is an investment.