Are Most Marketing Organizations On Life Support
We are on a marketing management journey to discover if most organizations are on life-support. If you’ve read our previous post Questions CEOs Ask About Marketing you know by now, that we are on a quest to understand the marketing dynamic within organizations. As we delved into this dilemma we asked ourselves: Is marketing the life force within organizations? Is there a marketing planning gap? Could marketing be the safety net most organizations need? Well…
-1- Marketing is the Life-Force
In organizations if the operations function is the legs of a company, then finance is the blood, technology the brain, sales the voice, and human resource the hands, all moving in tandem. But none of them can work without Marketing the heart of an organization …and without a healthy heart, an organization is well… on life-support!
So why is marketing management the heart of an organization? No organization can exist for its own sake. Organizations exist to provide a service or a product to a specific audience (whether institutional, customer, or consumer) as the case may be. The audience ‘consumer’ is the pulse. The pulse is monitored by marketing the heart. Marketing connects the organization to the audience at a deeper level. Marketing is therefore a must! Until and unless an organization, realities the Marketing Function is indeed the heart, that gives life, then that organization is on life-support!
-2- Marketing and the Planning-Gap
In most organizations, marketing plans are synonymous with action plans. Well, action plans are not strategic plans but are purely tactical. This creates, The Marketing Gap… Why is that? Action plans are actually an off shoot of marketing strategy. So, if there is no Marketing Strategy in the first place, this begs the question? Where did the action plans come from?
If you take a peek into the strategic planning sessions of many organizations, you will find that marketing management does not sit in on the conversation from the very beginning. The narrative is usually ‘marketing needs to wait until we agree on the next FY’s numbers. Which begs yet another question: Where did the numbers come from? Isn’t that working backwards?
In such a scenario, marketing will ensure its not left behind. And, marketing will commence crafting its own strategy. This is despite not having the benefit of a thorough understanding of the organizations overall commercial objectives. The ‘strategy’ will therefore be mostly composed of previously carried out activities that met with a modicum of success. A gap then begins to form. And this is where things fall apart. Because the marketing ‘strategy’ is not based on the overall organizations strategy. So again, we ask the question where did the marketing strategy come from?
-3- Marketing the Safety-Net
For organizations to build a solid marketing foundation, they need to have a safety-net beyond the traditional Product, Pricing, Placing, and Promotion basics. Organizations should stretch critical and strategic thinking, to include the Marketing Purpose, as well as the People driving the Process. This is achieved by developing a solid Marketing Organization, that connects Marketing Strategy, directly with the Company Objectives. Today, marketing is evolving beyond the traditional principles of marketing. A more holistic take on marketing has developed. In a nutshell, unless an organization wants to remain on life-support, it must have a clear understanding of its marketing management operations:
PURPOSE how its overall objectives tie in with the marketing strategy.
PEOPLE the structure of the core marketing operations function.
PROCESS the fit for purpose role of the marketing resource.
Lack of a thorough understanding of the Marketing Function’s Purpose, People and Processes. Is like going bungee jumping without a safety net. You might end up on life-support! And, so without a safety-net, organizations are on life-support! Without a holistic approach, the marketing function continues to be a last resort. Marketing remains mostly tactical and not strategic. Unless, this changes marketing, keeps falling through the cracks. In the end marketing gets into a vicious cycle and cannot get off this exhausting treadmill and onto sure-footed solid ground!
➤ Meet the SSR© Marketing Solution
The solution to organizations on life-support is to get marketing – off the treadmill and onto a safety-net ‘the SSR© Solution’. Start by making the marketing function a priority going forward… to shift the conversation from purely Tactical to resolutely Strategic, one step at a time. Eventually this will:
- Make marketing the life force because, without a healthy heart, an organization is on life support.
- Close the marketing planning gap so that marketing strategy lines up with the company’s objectives.
- Set-up marketing as a long-term safety net and get marketing off the treadmill and onto solid ground.
That is the reason why we developed the SSR© Marketing Management Solution. To solve the marketing management gap for organizations that don’t want to find themselves on life-support. The SSR Solution© is designed to elevate marketing from largely ambiguous to a valuable function with clear bottom-line deliverables. The result is a marketing organization that is a commercial pillar able to justify marketing effort and budgets and directly attribute the same to the bottom-line.
