Who among us in marketing has not heard a CEO say what we need are managers who know how to get the right results at the right cost if we are going to make our aggressive numbers and take care of our customers and employees?
CEOs demand results. That's clear.
However, it is not always clear just what results the CEO wants from marketing and how we should direct our efforts to produce those desired results.
Part 1 of this series made the case that marketing's unique promise of value to the organization—the marketing “brand”—is its focus on C: Customers and Competition.
But the challenge for marketers is to take this focus on customers and competition and actually contribute to the success of the organization by making decisions and taking actions that produce results. So the second critical part to Making Marketing Matter to the CEO is E for Effectiveness. Marketers must be effective.
How do we as marketers make sure that we are effective?
The wisdom I have gathered from work and discussions with many marketers suggests these three keys:
- Apply both science AND art.
- Bridge the knowledge/action gap.
- Get everyone on the same page.
Let's take each in turn.
1. Apply both science and art
Marketers with a scientific bent and marketers with a creative bent have both reported the death of marketing as we know it.
Sergio Zyman argues in The Death of Marketing as We Know It (Harper Business, 1999) for a new scientific approach to marketing. Bob Schmetterer in Leap: A Revolution in Creative Business Strategy (John Wiley & Sons, 2003) and Marc Gobe in Emotional Branding: The New Paradigm for Connecting Brands to People (Allworth Press, 2001) argue that it takes creative ideas to connect to consumers and grow businesses exponentially.
Nevertheless, according to today's practitioners, the death of marketing—whether as art or science—is highly exaggerated. Marketing effectiveness requires science and art.
Best Buy EVP, Consumer and Brand Marketing, Michael Linton, speaks for most top marketing executives of large companies when he states his belief that both science and art are critical: “Leaders must encourage and build both the creative and the math components of marketing and blend them as appropriate for the situation.”
However, Linton recognizes that it's a challenge to coordinate analytics and creativity: “I look for creatives who can deliver a large number of ideas, take criticism, evolve ideas over time and play on a team. The true power of marketing is achieved when the math and the creative are coordinated quickly and naturally.” (Inside the Minds: Leading Marketers, Apatore Books, 2001)
2. Bridge the knowledge/action gap
CEOs are frequently frustrated because people in their organization who are intelligent, creative and skilled are not as effective as the CEOs expect.
Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton, professors at Stanford Business School in organizational behavior, wrote in their now classic book The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge Into Action (Harvard Business School Press, 2000) that gains in productivity and competitive advantage depend on the capacity of an organization to turn knowledge into action and action into results:
Organizational performance often depends more on how skilled managers are at turning knowledge into action than on knowing the right thing to do. Knowledge and information are obviously crucial to performance. But we now live in a world where knowledge transfer and information exchange are tremendously efficient, and where there are numerous organizations in the business of collecting and transferring best practices. So, there are fewer and smaller differences in what firms know than in their ability to act on that knowledge.
Marketers can learn from five habits of effective companies—including Southwest Airlines, Trader Joe's, SAS, Men's Wearhouse, Ideo—observed by Pfeffer and Sutton:
- Knowing comes from doing and teaching others how.
- Action counts more than elegant plans and concepts.
- Allow mistakes and drive out fear.
- Fight the competition, not each other.
- Measure what matters and what can help turn knowledge into action that reflects a view toward the future, not the past, and considers processes as well as outcomes.
While implementing these guidelines may seem like a tall order for the marketing function—especially if the guidelines cut across the grain of the existing culture—the payback is enormous.
3. Get everyone on the same page
Effectiveness in marketing requires focus—with an additional set of P's: Purpose, Passion and People. As Jim Collins writes in his recent Fortune magazine cover story, “The 10 Greatest CEOs of All Time: Learn from Them” (July 21, 2003), “if one thing defines these ten giants, it was their deep sense of connectedness to the organization they ran.”
To be effective, marketers must also have a deep connectedness to—or a passion for—the purpose of their organizations. People with purpose and passion are unstoppable.
The bottom line of making marketing matter is summarized by CEO of Office Depot, Bruce Nelson: “To be a really great leader, you must have an insatiable appetite for accomplishments and results. You must always want to improve. That is a motivation to grow, to learn and to convert this growth into action.” (Become a CEO, Aspatore 2002)
Marketers: take heed!
Next time, in the last part in this series, we will explore the third and final dimension to “Making Marketing Matter to the CEO: O for Organization.” We'll address the need for marketers to break the internal bounds of the organization through formal and information interaction with staff in other departments, work within the existing organizational culture and embrace change both within and outside of the organization.
