Marketing Needs to Regain its “Street Cred”

Late last week, Peter Kim of Forrester summarized the findings of a long-term study we at ANA have enabled – Reinventing the Marketing Organization. Reinventing the marketing organization is one of our key pillars, in fact, our CEO, wrote about it not too long ago on his blog.

In his 50,000 foot summary, Peter lists 4 steps marketers must take to fix what is broken within marketing organizations:

ü To regain effectiveness, marketers must transition to a Customer-Centric Marketing Organization. Doing so requires: 1) redesigning P&Ls and metrics; 2) shifting culture away from marketing communications; 3) investing in a customer relationship infrastructure; and 4) rethinking agency relationships.

While these are important and meaningful steps – Peter, I think missed the most important first step – rebuilding credibility.  Marketing has little “street cred” within the organization today.  We talk our own language, we are great spin doctors when things are not going quite as well as we hoped they would be, we don’t hold ourselves to the same standards that others within the organizations must, and we often are myopic, looking at activities from our perspective not others.  Until we rebuild our credibility, marketing will never be seen as a corporate strategic leader, we will not be taken seriously, and we will be easily be taken down by finance, production or sales.

As I see it, there are three things that need to be done:

• First we have to help redefine the role of marketing.  That in many organizations is still in question. 
• Second, we need to be the customer insight guru.  Marketing has to be able to help the rest of the company understand what it is doing any why – what action will make your service/product more relevant and compelling than your competitor.  That only comes from customer insight. 
• Third, we need to build a metrics platform that combines the short-term reporting needs of the CEO/CFO with the long-term requirement for understand how we are driving brand equity growth (our job).

There ARE marketers sitting at the CEOs table determining what innovative, investment steps their corporation should take.  Just not enough of them.  Too many of us still think that “they just don’t get what we are doing” when in fact it is we marketers “who just don’t get what the corporation is about” and therefore don’t have the responsibility, authority or mandate to drive change.

Gain your street cred first, then determine what to change.

Comments

[Peter Kim]

Great points, Michael. The report actually gets into this area in greater detail, but there's only so much you can write in a blog post, right? The CMO Group at Forrester calls regaining street cred "the Marketing of Marketing" and produced a great report earlier this year on the topic. http://www.forrester.com/LeadershipBoards/CMOGroup