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Established industries are often disrupted. Consider technology's disruption of stock markets and traditional travel agencies, or streaming services' disruption of the entertainment industry.

In every case, the incumbents argued, "It's not as easy as dismantling the status quo and starting over." And, yet, every time the upstarts did exactly that, and the dinosaurs eventually became extinct.

Today, disruption is happening not only in marketing but also in the business world overall, and C-suite must take note.

In classic organizations, executives establish goals and overarching strategy; then, Manufacturing, Research and Development, and Design put together plans on how to hit those goals. Meanwhile, IT, Marketing, Finance, and other "support" departments determine the budget they will need to both meet the organization's goals and answer the needs of the main business departments.

Marketing's plans in that scenario are thus fractured, and they become mortar to the company's other bricks. They rarely communicate how marketing efforts connect directly to the business's goals.

If that sounds like you, watch out.

Why the Traditional Role of Marketing in Business Must Change

In today's world, the traditional role of marketing in business hasn't just been flipped on its head, it's been reimagined entirely.

Now, the first step a brand takes with a Version 1.0 product is marketing—i.e., finding out how customers interact with a brand. What do they like and dislike? How much do they spend? How often do they buy?

As a company learns more about its customers' behaviors, it is able to define a total revenue goal for various customer types.

From there, Finance, Marketing, and Technology work together to build a tech stack for customer acquisition targets by customer type—and the marketing budget quite naturally falls out of those needs. Technology supports and drives Marketing and Finance by enabling insights and connections across the enterprise; and then R&D, Manufacturing, and Design learn not only from Marketing's insights but also from Finance's analysis to iterate and develop even better products.

That isn't to say that Marketing or Finance is the center of an organization; it's to say that all departments contribute to the organization in a meaningful capacity.

As a marketer today, if you ask what your budget is, you will get blank stares because budgets are defined in terms of the cost to acquire a new customer or achieve retention goals.

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Avoid Marketing Irrelevance: Stop Asking 'What's Our Budget?' and Start Asking 'What's Our Revenue Target?'

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image of Jay Friedman

Jay Friedman is a partner and the president of Goodway Group. He helped transform Goodway into a fast-growing digital media company in 2006, and later into the leading independent digital provider it is today.

LinkedIn: Jay Friedman

Twitter: @jaymfriedman