By Lucy Davison, Managing Director,
Keen as Mustard Marketing.
People attracted to a
career in marketing are generally extroverts. We get excited by external,
customer-focused activity. Winning new customers and contracts, wealth
creation, and hopefully, dizzily huge budgets - these make us tick.
Working in the marketing team, the last thing on our minds is worrying
about what the rest of the company thinks of our exciting and glamorous lives.
They are probably jealous anyway.
However, there is a
danger in
marketers not applying their
expertise to themselves. Successful marketing involves and integrates
other parts of the business in what it does. Textbooks refer to integrated
marketing as co-ordinating marketing activities across all channels
so that a customer gets
a distinct and consistent experience. So, this is a plea for another view
of integrated marketing – marketing that is integrated across the whole
business.
Whether the function is highly
centralised or loosely decentralised, it needs recognition and support from
within in order to deliver great customer experiences.
Several years ago I ran a research study
which explored the relationship between marketing and other departments such as
HR, Finance, Sales, Operations and IT. We surveyed 1000 white-collar
employees and managers in mid-size and large companies (over 250 employees), in
the UK and the USA. The results showed that marketers face a significant
challenge in making the case for marketing within their organisations.
Respondents thought that marketing was less important to the business than
manufacturing & operations, sales, finance, IT and customer service. In
fact, it came second bottom - just above those pariahs in HR.
In addition to regarding marketing as
being peripheral, people demonstrated a lack of understanding of what marketing
does. They thought that marketing was primarily concerned with
advertising. Brand development and new product development were not seen
as key marketing activities. The internal management of brand was seen as
the least important role of the department overall.
How are companies to deliver truly integrated
marketing touch-points without consistent and powerful internal communication
of their company brand – the vision, values and ways of behaving that underpin
great brand experiences for customers? When you go to Accenture staff at
all levels clearly understand their role and how to deliver the company brand.
Advertising agency BBH has its beliefs clearly on
show in reception and uses its culture as a differentiator.
So how to ‘market marketing’ internally? Here
are three top tips.
-
You cannot over-communicate internally. This may seem
obvious, but if marketers do not build positive awareness for what they do
and counter the misconceptions, then it will be very difficult to garner
support.
-
Establish a cross-discipline approach. Ideally, the
business culture already encourages cross-discipline teamwork that brings
together different perspectives, skills and deliverables. But if
not, marketing should take a proactive role in fostering more work across
teams. Successful implementation of the marketing strategy as well
as of a host of brand building activities need to be planned in
conjunction with other functions such as Finance, HR and Operations.
-
Establish champions within the organisation. Senior
managers are more likely to come from a finance background than
marketing. Bean counters look very closely for a measureable return
on marketing investment. To win their support marketers need to
demonstrate in concrete ways how they are helping to grow the
business. We can start with turnover and market share, but also need
to work out how to demonstrate ROI from building the business’s
reputation, vision and strategy.
Finally, remember to share and not steal
glory. It’s not just because of that great DM campaign and the careful follow
up and nurturing that that £million new customer signed up, it’s because of the
efficiency of the IT systems, the careful pricing negotiations by Finance and
the brilliance of Operations to deliver. Great marketing is essential,
but just one part of the jigsaw of a thriving business.
lucy@mustardmarketing.com