The Marketing Bureau

I have just returned from a business trip during which I spent several days with a group of very senior, very talented managers from a variety of organisations of quite diverse types.These senior managers were from a variety of disciplines including General Management, IT, Production, Operations, Human Resources and Finance. The one discipline that was not represented amongst the group was Marketing.

We talked extensively about Marketing as a concept, a state of mind and a discipline which comprises an ever growing and changing array of tools & techniques.

We discussed my contention that, at its most fundamental, a business is a marketing organism. I shared my perspective that in business (and, indeed, in life), there is only one place from where the money originates – customers. The rest is simply redistribution and recirculation.

I opined that, given these simple but compelling truths, the only orientation that a business can intelligently adopt if it is to survive and thrive is a market orientation.

We had little trouble reaching broad agreement that a market orientation requires, amongst other things, the entire organisation to be orientated towards the market – that the role and contribution of all other aspects of an organisation in terms of structure, culture, attitude and operation, is no more complex than to support and contribute to the perpetual task of identifying and meeting customer needs and wants, at a profit, time after time after time.

We were in concert, in the end, with the realisation that, if a business is not doing this, then it is risking, at best, sub optimal performance and, at worst, failure.

So imagine my shock when, towards the conclusion of our time together, each of these senior managers, without exception, revealed that they had found our discussions “powerfully insightful” and “extraordinarily useful” as they had not previously been exposed “to any of this stuff”.

Commented one “It’s been excellent, Brian. I’ve never had anything to do with Marketing before and the insights I have gained are fresh, powerful and infinitely useful for me”.

Another remarked “Wow, I can see that my own organisation has got a truckload of work to do based on what I am taking away from our time together”.

And another said “I just know that when I get back to the office I am going to cause a huge stir just talking about this stuff, let alone setting out to do it”.

Based on this experience I, once again, find myself wondering.

Wondering what, if not leading and driving the marketing concept, a CEO is actually doing in their organisations.

Wondering what orientation, if not a market orientation, many organisations continue to perpetuate and how they justify and rationalise that to themselves, their shareholders and, indeed, their other stakeholder groups, not least of whom are customers.

Wondering how optimal business performance can be accomplished and sustained if the reality of customers being the only place the money comes from is not reflected in everything and anything an organisation thinks, feels and does.

Wondering whether it really might be true that, as I often feel that it is, organisations risk regarding customers with contempt, as little more than the tit from which the milk flows and which, in order to harvest that milk, simply requires those tits to be pulled on a regular basis.

Wondering whether there is still a belief ,in too many organisations, that the concept of marketing is about nothing more than arresting the human intelligence for long enough to extract money from it.

Wondering why there are Executive MBA Curriculums that do not include Marketing when, to me, this seems as daft (and as dangerous) as omitting Avionics from Pilot Training.

Wondering why the focus on the customer is often limited to a sales team whose job it seems to be to “just deliver the numbers” by doing pretty much whatever that takes and a marketing team who are often not a marketing team at all but, rather, are little more than a promotional task force (at best) where the quality, qualifications and skills of those who comprise the team reflect that sorry and inadequate reality.

Most of all I wonder what we need to do to get CEOs to realise that, in order to accomplish optimum performance in their business, they need to fundamentally reassess if and how their business understands and responds to the simple, but compelling reality, that there is only one place the money comes from – and you surely remember where that is?

But as I prepare to turn off my laptop and head for my bed, I am encouraged by the likelihood that there are a bunch of senior managers who are about to put the cat amongst the pigeons in their own organisations and that, in due course, a heap of people are going to reap the benefits of that.

Brian H Meredith