When I was designing trade show booth graphics, clients would send us their booth before and after each show. Before the show to check that panels fit correctly and after to make sure nothing was damaged before going into storage.
Without fail, one clients’ booth case would return after each show with the bottom littered with business cards collected during the show.
I remember the first time this happened. I called our contact in the company’s marketing department and told her there were all these cards in the bottom of the case.
This was her response “That’s sales’ problem.”
“That’s sales’ problem?”
That bothers me. Because I don’t believe companies can function as fractionalized entities with some invisible wall where one department ends and another begins.
But let’s do the math on those business cards.
About 50 cards in this case. Say 7% convert, so about 3 out of 50. With an average contract value of $1 million per year, that’s $3 million each year in lost sales. This card issue occurred 3-4 times per year. Was it any surprise when this division never lived up to their potential and was sold?
All too often, departments treat their particular areas as little fiefdoms, drawing a virtual moat around their castle of “not my problem”. That’s sales’ problem, that’s marketing’s problem, that’s finance’s problem…
With marketing departments, the belief is that they can go off and do their little voodoo independent of any other functions within the company and magically customers will flock to their door – and keep returning.
“Go off and do what you do and just get me customers.”
– direct quote from a CEO.
Ponder this quote from marketing great Malcom McDonald
If the term ‘marketing’ is intended to embrace all those activities related to demand creation and satisfaction and the associated intelligence, then it is clear that most marketing takes place during the service delivery and customer contact process, in all its forms. Marketing, then, reflects this process and it is absurd to believe that it is the sole domain of those people in the organization who happen to belong to the marketing department.
McDonald, Malcolm; Wilson, Hugh. Marketing Plans: How to Prepare Them, How to Use Them
In fewer words, anyone within the company that is customer facing is involved in marketing.
Much more important, however, than who is responsible for marketing in an organization is the question of its marketing orientation, i.e. the degree to which the company as a whole understands the importance of finding out what customer groups want and of organizing all the company’s resources to satisfy those wants at a profit.
McDonald, Malcolm; Wilson, Hugh. Marketing Plans: How to Prepare Them, How to Use Them.
The company. As a whole.
What would be a customer’s reaction if you’re marketing your company as having friendly customer service and your customer service people are surly and rude?
Marketing cannot fix that.
Marketing, and advertising, will only emphasize what is already going on within your company. If your internal organization is a mess, it will come through. If your product sucks, it will show. Blaming marketing when it does is akin to blaming the mechanic when you run your car out of gas.
Effective marketing needs to have coordinated buy in from all within the organization, particularly those on top. If you choose not to believe this, there are many examples, small and large, in the graveyard of companies of those who also chose not to.
To say the Marketing Department is responsible for marketing is like saying love is the responsibility of one family member.
Alan Mitchell, freelance journalist for Marketing Business.
