The Marketer's Job #1

To set up this controversial topic, I thought this brief quote would stir interest in looking at what marketer's are and how they should be evaluated. What, exactly, is their job!

The Fournaise Marketing Group, one of the world's leading Marketing Performance Measurement & Management (MPM) companies, tracked that 80% of CEOs were not very impressed by the work done by Marketers and believed Marketers were poor business performers. CEOs thought Marketers: (1) could not adequately prove the positive business impact their marketing activities had, (2) had lost sight of what their job really was (i.e. to generate more customer demand for their products/services), and (3) were not business performance-obsessed enough.

Tell us something we don't know.

The B2B Marketing Group on LinkedIn recently started a discussion about what the difference is between marketing and selling. It eventually came down to defining marketing.

After 75 comments and still growing, it was clear why marketers themselves often get confused about what their primary roles should be when leading the marketing function in their businesses.

Here are some selected comments that sometimes indicate a lack of understanding about the marketing role should be as they see it. Some of the comments are true in my opinion, but others seem to stray solely into the how totally ignoring the what.

In other words, comments from marketers often obsess with the strategy without first clearly quantitying the results. Even the evaluation of the marketing role tends toward how well the strategy was performed rather than the results for which the srategies were originally conceived.

-"Marketing is Analysis of the business process in providing a need. Sales is the action taken to satisfy the need with or without marketing."

-" Marketing involves more than promotions. And sometimes sales are made without a salesperson."

-"Simple. Marketing informs and educates, sales qualifies and closes!

-"Marketing generally creates a model of the customer, either explicit or implied, and crafts messages, campaigns, brand strategies, and all the other busywork that goes into the job description. But critically, marketing deals with the customer (or prospect, if you prefer) as an abstract.

-""Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. (Approved October 2007)"

My Take:

We tend to focus on the tasks, tactics and strategies marketers use rather than their role. Positioning products, branding the company, analyzing the competitive environment, creating the messaging, outbound combined with inbound marketing, establishing an effective CRM program -- all of these are generally how the job is done and not why the job may or may not be getting done.

That's why marketers look at the total sales process in their companies. Great advertising with an understaffed and poorly trained inbound telephone force will kill a quality marketing program.

A CRM program that experiences a poor internal adoption rate is a marketing problem. This barrier will decimate sales and corporate profitability.

Job #1 for the marketer is to increase sales and profits for the company. In other words, creating consumer demand works only if prospects buy at sufficient levels to achieve the companies sales objectives.