Don’t Leave Marketing Up to the Marketers

This article originally ran in the Knoxville News-Sentinel.

What?? Did I just say that? Perhaps — as a lifelong marketer — I should explain that statement.

What I mean is that marketing has become too important to exist within a corporate vacuum. In working with many different types of clients, we have a living laboratory in which to study what makes some organizations more high-performing than others when it comes to reaching and motivating their targeted customers and key audiences.

While much of a company’s success in selling its products and services obviously has to do with the quality of their products and their ability to meet a defined marketplace need, an increasingly important factor in that success equation has to do with how the organization approaches the actual task of marketing.

Every company needs to periodically step back and ask itself:

1. What overall values and goals drive our brand strategy and customer outreach?
2. What are the necessary capabilities we must have in order to drive true marketing excellence?
3. And what internal structures and ways of working can we create to better encourage and support our success in this regard?

I would maintain that marketing can no longer be a discrete entity within a company, but rather, it must extend itself throughout the company, tapping into virtually every operational function.

It used to be that the researchers would study and invent a new product; chief financial officers would determine the financial model under which the product would be priced and financially measured; the manufacturing folks would actually make it; the operations side would manage it; and yes, then the marketers would position, promote and help it. It was a fairly linear process. This model, however, no longer works.

Marketing now must be more of a holistic function within a company. Its job is to deliver a seamless experience to the customers — one in which every person at every step of the corporate process is informed by smart data and is infused with a consistent brand purpose and a shared vision of how they want the ultimate customer to interact with the brand and the product.

Cathy Ackermann is the founder of Ackermann Marketing & PR, now a part of Designsensory.