You were promised space to develop a new vision for growth, a vital transformational role, a seat at the strategic table. Instead, you’ve walked into a marketing leader’s nightmare.
Oh, the interview promises. The thrill of the offer. The pipedreams of success. Ninety days of handshakes, business lunches and brand diagnosis…only to discover – to your utter horror – your new organisation treats marketing like a game of Twister played in the dark. Limbs like tactics everywhere, strategy louche, unexpected spills inevitable and nobody entirely sure why they signed up in the first place.
Realising with gut-wrenching inevitability that strategic marketing in your new employer is less a guiding force and more an afterthought, you begin to see your vision of market dominance reduced somewhat. Strategy, that gleaming sword of choices and competitive advantage, is wielded like a wooden spoon against the forces of mediocrity. You stand there, watching the great ship of brand building and strategic marketing take on water, its sails fashioned from last quarter’s recycling bin, and wonder if you should have taken up beekeeping instead.
Are marketers sacrificing strategy as tactics take over?
Welcome to every marketer’s Hotel California, where marketing is a decorative garnish and order-taking the house special. Finance worships at the altar of monthly forecasts. sales barks demands like an impatient diner and product keeps making more and more complex things no one actually wants or needs.
It is only in this moment of epiphany, with your marketing and brand building ambition dissolving into a whirlwind of reactive firefighting, that you fully comprehend the opportunity cost of the marketing team spending all their time responding to sales and product requests like short-order cooks in a diner where the customers don’t know what they want, but they know they want it yesterday. If you do nothing, as the song goes: Enjoy your stay. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.
Today, many marketers are increasingly putting up with this kind of situation. Some, who make the time to look up from their latest campaign on TikTok, even realise they may be selling themselves and their function short. Many, sadly, are ignorant of the true potential of a well executed marketing strategy to transform commercial performance and elevate the role of marketing to its rightful place. Luckily, there are ways to turn the tide for those stuck in this tactical rut.
The mission to elevate marketing
Back to our newly arrived marketing leader. Let’s start at the beginning…It is important to remember that you joined a business with bold and ambitious growth plans. A business which had worked out where it was going to play and how it was going to win, to steal Lafferty’s wonderful phrase. Except they hadn’t really worked out how to win. Not entirely anyway.
The big strategy decks that showed the cash bridge to doubling profit, the hockey stick of growth through increased product revenues missed something, like most consultant’s decks do – customers. And as importantly, the role strategic marketing must play to unlock customer value beyond simply addressing foundational customer journeys, serving up basic propositions that get you to sector parity and using pricing that won’t kill the initiative stone dead before it is born.
Marketing is not an optional condiment – it is the whole bloody meal.
There is a significant role for marketing in any organisation seeking new growth, if it is only allowed. The truth is boards need to recognise strategic acumen and a strong marketing voice do not happen by accident. They require expert marketing capabilities, attentive nurturing and an organisational culture that values long-term brand building as much as short-term tactical gains. After all, without this they will find themselves watching competitors outmanoeuvre their company, leaving them struggling for scraps in the industry they once led.
Strong marketers do create worlds where strategic marketing leads and drives business growth, and in this world it is where customer insights drive not just campaigns but broader business decisions. These leaders have to consistently exhibit critical attributes that will lead to success, such as an unremitting focus on the end goal, flexible thinking in how to get there, steady application, resilience, prudent risk taking and a lot of leadership. Elevating marketing strategy in an organisation where the culture doesn’t naturally champion it is no small task. Beekeeping is much easier.
So, for ‘the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers’ to coin the opening line in one of my favourite ads, the one’s who don’t want marketing to be reduced to a tactic, here are some steps to consider when repositioning marketing in any organisation with a growth agenda:
Demonstrate strategic alignment of marketing to the business goals
This begins with a clear-eyed review of where the marketing capability and cost base is today, vis-à-vis business goals. Identifying and calling out the pain points the organisation experiences with the marketing team – such as campaigns that aren’t designed to deliver in-year commercial outcomes, a lack of measurement etc – is a precursor to stopping all misaligned activities, which is a must. This sets the stage for a reset with the MDs, commercial leaders and the board.
Demonstrate you are a commercial leader
However, it’s not enough to just highlight pain points and re-orientate marketing activities back to the business plan. Next, you will have to turn to the overall cost base and very probably acknowledge that money is not being well spent on marketing today.
The truth is the exec all think this anyway and most likely they are right. This marketing mea culpa will unlock a priceless opportunity for you to lead out a restructuring exercise, enabling you to right size and reshape your marketing capabilities end to end, setting the function up for the future through tried and tested approaches:
A) Organisational design – by reducing spans and layers, focusing core capabilities in-house and outsourcing specialist or commodity tasks to third parties.
B) Clarifying roles and responsibilities – codify ‘one-way’ of doing marketing with a clear RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted and informed framework) setting out responsibilities and accountabilities across the target operating model with the business. This will remove duplication and empower quick decision making, focusing resources.
C) Buying better – rationalise your supply base, procure services at better prices, invest in a media expert to lead out your planning and buying, and, critically, audit your agencies. You will be amazed at the unpaid POs and monies they will be happily sitting on earning them interest for free.
Build a marketing plan that merges commercial goals with audiences
Whilst restructuring, resist the temptation to rush in and deliver quick tactical wins. Instead deploy a structured planning process with finance and business stakeholders to build a rock-solid marketing strategy:
A) Segment the market to identify the target audiences that you need to win with to deliver the revenue growth in the commercial plan. Then ignore the other audiences.
B) Position the brand and products to overcome the target audiences’ barriers to purchase, so they choose your brand over alternatives.
C) Develop audience based SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) objectives that focus on the commercial outcomes you are targeting, through shifting audience attitudes or behaviours. Clear objectives are a no-brainer to link marketing activities to specific commercial outcomes – i.e. demonstrate the value of marketing investments. Yet repeatedly I experience teams that make no attempt to do this and wonder why finance keep reducing their budgets.
There’s a lot more to it of course, but these foundations will go a long way to setting you up for success and persuade your peers that marketing isn’t just the quick turnaround ‘colouring-in’ department. Marketing should not be seen or thought of as decoration or the fun bit in work; it is a scalpel. And wielded correctly, it can carve a company’s future into something worth more than the sum of its spreadsheets. But that, of course, requires the organisation to understand marketing is not an optional condiment – it is the whole bloody meal.
Boardrooms that fail to understand this will soon find themselves not just losing market share, but losing relevance entirely. Perhaps, more pertinently, marketing leaders who fail to understand this will join the merry-go-round of peripatetic CMOs who pass from role to role, never lasting more than two to three years in any one company before they are found out.
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