By Brian H Meredith
From the NZBusiness Magazine "Marketing Maestro" Archive.
First published September 2003
Recently, as I walked briskly through the suburban wilderness of the Albany Supa Centre on Auckland’s North Shore (and I was walking briskly - no-one in their right mind would want to spend a moment longer than necessary in this wasteland of tin sheds and concrete hangers posing as superstores) , the words of Bill Bryson* came to mind...
“It seems so odd and sad that mankind could,
for centuries, have so effortlessly graced the landscape with structures that
seemed made for it – little arched bridges and stone farmhouses, churches,
windmills, winding roads, hedgerows – and now appeared quite unable to do
anything to the countryside that wasn’t like a slap across the face. We used to
build civilisations and now we build shopping malls”
Offering
what Bryson describes as “at best, a sleek utility”, it is painfully clear that
environments are being built for someone other than us, the real stakeholders
in our society. And for that I
substantially blame marketers.
The Albany
Supa Centre wasn’t designed with the comfort of shoppers in mind. If it were,
it would be more than a cluster of cheaply thrown together warehouses
surrounded by a sea of tarmac. Too many retail environments are an assault on our
senses.
And then
there’s Britomart. Am I the only misguided fool who can’t help chanting the
mantra “A single terminal does not a public transport system make?” Who is it
for? Clearly not passengers.
My heart
goes out to those amongst you who, for a huge chunk of your adult lives,
inhabit the travesty of environments for humans that is the contemporary office
building, not, by any wild stretch of the imagination, designed with people in
mind but, rather, to deliver a yield per square metre .
When flying
to a Tourism Conference some years ago, I was seated next to a fellow delegate
who turned out to be the Vice President, Sales & Marketing, of a very well
known international chain of hotels. I made a remark to do with some aspect of building
design which impacted on hotel operations and her replied stunned me - “Ah, but
as VP Sales & Marketing I don’t have anything to do with the operation of
the hotels” No wonder the plug for the jug is in the bathroom.
And here is
the clue to the problem.
Organisations
are not, in the main, run by, or well advised by, marketers. They are run by
accountants. Or engineers. Or administrators. But marketers are notable by their absence in
the leadership role.
The reason
that this matters is this:
An
organisation, by definition, only exists to meet the needs of someone and that
“someone” comprises a number of stakeholder groups of which one is the customer,
or end user/beneficiary, of the organisation’s products and/or services.
Regrettably,
accountants, engineers, administrators and the like have not shown any
substantive evidence to-date that they understand this core reality of
organisational existence. They end up being hijacked by the loudest or most
proximate voices amongst their stakeholder groups (often shareholders) who
demand fast returns. Period.
Or they just
exhibit plain, old fashioned greed or self interest.
The harsh
reality is that very few organisations ever actually manage to place the
marketing concept at the centre of their universe. Some try and fail and many
don’t bother to try. For them, it makes no sense at all to consider the architecture
of the mall, the office building, the transport interchange or the hotel from
the user’s point of view (the shopper, the office worker, the passenger, the guest).
There is nary a marketer anywhere near those decisions.
The interest
represented by marketers (and often only by marketers) is that of all
stakeholder groups, including the customer or end user. But this interest must
reside not simply within the title or job description of a marketer – it must
reside within every fibre of the organisation’s being. Only then might we begin
to see organisations refocusing their endeavours towards the simple reality
that, ultimately, it is people and the society which they, together, comprise
who must be the central focus of organisational thinking – whose needs the
organisation exists to serve.
Fulfilling
those needs requires “users” to be central to everything the organisation does
and that, often, means starting with the environments they create and with
which society is forced to interact.
“Build it
and they will come” will ring true only when “they” want to come, so involve them at the outset and not just when you
want to extract money from them with the omnipresent marketers cry of “Up to
50% off!”
Comments
Post has no comments.