The Marketing Bureau

By Brian H Meredith
From the NZBusiness Magazine"Marketing Maestro" Archive.
First published February 2010

Two questions: When was the last time you were surprised and delighted by a product or service that you had purchased for the first time and for which you had been exposed to advertising and/or some other element of promotional material which had influenced your purchase decision? When was the last time you were disappointed by a product or service that you had purchased for the first time and for which you had been exposed to advertising and/or some other element of promotional material which had influenced your purchase decision? Bet the answer to Question 2 was more recent than the answer to Question 1.

Bet the frequency of the experience described in Question 2 is much more common than the experience described in Question 1.

Based both on my own experience, as well as that of a miscellany of people with whom I frequently discuss this issue, most of us are disappointed or underwhelmed by product & service delivery far more than we are surprised and delighted.

And one of the effects of this chronic trend of over promise and under delivery is that our expectations are driven down (good thing too, might say some unscrupulous marketers – lower expectations easier and cheaper to meet), our cynicism about all things business & marketing is fuelled and, worst of all, businesses themselves experience ongoing sub optimal performance or even failure simply because they can’t or won’t get it right for the customer.

Both consumers and B2B customers are increasingly sophisticated when it comes to how they receive, process and respond to marketing communications activity. But for some reason, too many businesses are nowhere near as sophisticated.

Typically, marketers fail to fully understand who their target markets really are. They talk about segmentation but if they practice it at all it is little more than a sloppy exercise in separating male from female, young from old or Auckland from Wellington. Segmentation based detailed socio-economics and psychographics is hardly practiced at all outside the handful of leading fmcg marketers.

Typically, marketers take little trouble to accurately identify the wants (and the needs that underlie those wants) in order, not just to develop marcoms that are relevant to, and resonate with, their carefully segmented target markets, but also (god forbid) to actually develop product and service offerings that are driven by that understanding.

Typically, marketers do not have the expertise, knowledge or internal powerbase from which to drive the kind of strategy development that is vital if they are to “identify and/or create needs and/or wants amongst their chosen target markets and fulfill them, at a profit, time after time after time. Marketers in this country are, mostly, little more than a bunch of bright, energetic young things who brief agencies, run sales promotions and drink fizz at product launches.

But it is not the fault of marketers that this state of affairs is now prevalent . The real decisions and strategy development is going on at a higher table than that occupied by most marketers and that is where the wheels start to come off (if they were ever on in the first place).

Accountants (the most dominant profession on these top tables), engineers (the second most dominant but a long, long way behind beanies) and lawyers (roughly 2nd equal with engineers in their presence at the top table) simply do not understand marketing.

Of far greater concern is that if they don’t understand marketing then they don’t understand business.

Successful business (and, specifically, I mean well established, long established, trusted businesses who are consistently meeting the needs of all of their stakeholder groups, not just the shareholders) understand the vital importance of long term thinking, flexible short term responding and the key role that investing in customer satisfaction and loyalty plays in their long term success. They know this is the only place the money comes from.

Too many businesses, however, are thinking shorter and shorter term and are driving that thinking down through the ranks of the organisation.

Brand? What’s that? Get this week’s numbers up!

Relationships? A luxury we can’t afford – this is about survival. Get this week’s numbers up!

Marketing? A big black hole we can’t afford to pour money into. Get this week’s numbers up!

The result?  

Businesses that have shaved that much cost that any hint of a growth spurt is likely to cause them to wobble.

Businesses that concentrate solely on arresting the human intelligence for long enough to extract money from it and bugger the consequences.

Businesses that over promise and under deliver.

Businesses that are price obsessed because “that’s the only way we can hold our share”.

Businesses that shout to get customer attention rather than attempt to engage with those customers through communications that resonate with those customers.

Businesses that are showing all of the sophistication and finesse of the old used car salesman paradigm and failing to realise that customers are increasingly frustrated with being faced with that assault.

Overall, a business sector that is being severely and chronically weakened by their consistent failure  to understand that there is only one place the money comes from and that in order to capture their share of that money requires an understanding of what the key drivers of business really are, how the marketing concept is at the centre of the business universe and the need to purge accountants, lawyers and engineers from their comfy top table and seek out talented, qualified and committed marketers who are, after all, the only people who can really make growth happen.