“Executives must begin to treat brands and customers as assets rather than expenses” – headline for a recent magazine article. No joke. But, boy am I tired of hearing this. Marketer’s eyes must be glazing over when they see or hear another article or speech starting out in this fashion. As a marketer, I know what the problem is, I want to know how to fix it.
At the of the beginning of the book The Goal (a great book on process) the main character finally discovers the secret to business success. It is in the form of three questions. You must know: What to change, What to change to, and How to cause the change.
We know what to change. Marketers have to be more metric centric like the rest of the business units. Talk to the CFO/CEO in speak they understand. Interestingly enough, our ANA study found that marketers at a 4-to-1 ratio are more concerned with brand guidelines than top-line growth (the CEOs top priority).
Now we know what to change to. Marketers have to wake up and find out what’s on the CEOs mind. Executives don’t have to change - marketers do. Until marketers can clearly demonstrate that what they are doing is making a real difference to the bottom line, executives will continue down the path they are going. They will tell marketers what needs to be done, they will tell marketers how much money they have to spend, they will tell marketers when they are cutting the marketing budget and staff. And marketers will just have to take it.
I definitely agree with the need for more discipline and alignment with the CEO's agenda in Marketing. I wrote recently a post describing the status of marketing performance management in the marketing function
Eric
http://h20325.www2.hp.com/blogs/kintz/archive/2006/04/20/924.html
Posted by: Eric Kintz | April 27, 2006 at 07:34 PM