What if you stopped Marketing?

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you just stopped all the marketing outreach?

Would your sales continue? Possibly, if your product and service is good, and your brand well enough known. For a while at least.

It's never a bad thing to stop wasting money on those marketing actions that don't deliver.

But stopping altogether? Your competitors would certainly love you!

What would happen to your market share? Share price? Market cap? Brand value? ... The truth is you could irreparably harm your brand and business.?

Yet, as businesses look to make savings, marketing is all too often and too blindly the first to be hit.

Everyone's a marketer.

I’ve led marketing across many industries and sectors. One common task? Having to justify budgets, plans and, sometimes, the team’s existence to CEOs and CFOs - who think they know better.

Business leaders justifiably need and want to understand what Marketing is delivering. What they are ‘getting’ for the money invested.

And it’s true that marketers don’t always do themselves justice here. They aren't always proactive in aligning on expectations from the outset. Nor can they succeed if they fail to adapt their story to the needs and (financial) lingo of the business.

But there’s something else at play:

More than any other area of the business, Marketing's work and results are judged by those lacking any actual experience and insight.?

Everyone has an opinion on Marketing. It's as if being a viewer of ads, being a social media user, hell, just being a consumer somehow pre-qualifies you as an expert.

Driving a car doesn't make you a mechanic.

You wouldn't tell a surgeon which scalpel to use.

Yet everyone and his wife is always willing to share their opinion on Marketing. Especially when a campaign doesn't work as hoped. Or, worse still, when the company experiences a downturn.

The fact is only 10% of the CEOs at the largest 250 companies have marketing experience and only 4% have ever been CMOs.

The majority come from financial and legal backgrounds. Hungry for 'evidence'. For facts. For the right numbers.

So, marketers increasingly strive to provide them. Great swathes of metrics. From clicks and impressions to measuring lifetime value. 'Evidence' is there. All the more readily in today's digital world.

The trouble is: not all evidence is created equal. And not all evidence tells the right story.

'Not everything that matters can be measured' (Albert Einstein)

Take 'last-click attribution', once the darling of metrics. Wise marketers understand that isolating the driver of a sale is NEVER a black and white story.

Focusing on that last click ignores the wider customer journey, especially its very start. It suggests every touchpoint before the conversion is irrelevant. It leads to an incomplete understanding of the journey. It overlooks how different channels contribute to conversion which, in turn, can lead to a misallocation of budget. And, ultimately, a lack of balance between sales-driving tactics and brand building. (For more on this see The 3rd Age of Effectiveness by Les Binet Tom Roach and Dr Grace Kite ).

With the explosion of digital, it feels that Marketing has become increasingly short-term. Overly focused on sales tactics and quick wins.

The fact that people are calculating Return On Investment from single ads is alarming. The fact that CEOs and CFOs are increasingly lapping this up, even more so. ROI stats from digital are quick and fast. Anyone can buy ad space on a platform and likely ‘get results’ from even the ‘ugliest’ of ads.

But what of the longer-term view? What about brand? Loyalty, trust, love - though these less tangibles are richly debated with countless theories on how best to measure them.

Marketing’s true meaning

The fact is, Marketing is not just about delivering campaigns. It's not a one-time fix to a problem.

Marketing is about championing the consumer.

It's not only about using paid, earned and owned media to reach out to customers. Marketing seeks to understand their needs and preferences and adapt to these as they evolve. Marketing should determine how products and services should be priced, presented (and in some cases designed) to meet those needs.

At many companies, a run-of-the-mill product or average experience is only heightened by the compelling, creative marketing that gets customers to try the brand at least once, and maybe even repeat a purchase.

Without Marketing, companies must rely solely on the merits of their products and services. Are yours strong enough that customers would recommend them and keep coming back, without Marketing prompts?

Regularly reviewing and adapting your Marketing efforts is essential. Making decisions on just one campaign’s ‘ROI’ is dangerous.

Considering what might happen if you stopped marketing altogether is a great exercise to run across the business (as long as you include your Marketing experts in the debate, of course). Before you undertake any decisions, make sure your truly understand Marketing’s remit and potential.