Marketing united?
A quick glance at marketing’s love-hate relationship with Finance, Technical, Production, Sales & Distribution.
You know I want your lovin’
Honey, why are you so hard?
From ‘Temporary like Achilles’ by Bob Dylan
Bit of an aside here: The only time I saw Bob Dylan was the night after an exceptionally-rare hurricane hit southern England in October 1987. Surprisingly, Dylan was distant, uncommunicative and, well, uninterested. That just about sums his massively (to me) disappointing performance on that post-hurricane night: No connection.
According to the Met Office, the last English storm of similar magnitude occurred in 1703.
17:03? Marketing’s scheduled time to connect with finance, sales, distribution, production and technical…
Antipathy or apathy – or a bit of both? Whatever. This lack of connection definitely damages the bottom line.
Pulling in the same direction?
Much of the traditional friction between marketing and other core functions perhaps stems from the fact that marketers can be poor communicators when it comes to clearly explaining marketing’s commercial purpose to the ‘colleague-functions’.
If marketing’s purpose is to serve just two commercial objectives – cultivating consistent customers and preventing price pressure (CCC & PPP) – then surely all other functions should be in-harness with it? Not subject to marketing or ruled by it, but part of it.
B2B marketing is all about buying: who’s buying; what they’re buying; and how buying helps their business. For me, this What-How-Who of Buying should not only determine the nature and implementation of all marketing activities, it should also be regarded as a priority across all the other activities within a B2B company.
Just as a simple example of this: does the FD spend any time at all with counterparts in the customer base? And if these interactions take place at all, what are their objectives and how does marketing receive some feedback?
Lightweight marketing = lightweight results
Yesterday, I talked to the Jo’burg MD of a global communications agency. Having spent some time bemoaning the generally parlous state of B2B and its ‘vin ordinaire’ approach to marcomms, the MD suggested that the problem was largely due to a lack of even basic marketing skills within too many B2B companies – let alone any sort of commercial vision or enthusiasm for contributing to the bottom line.
Another old stumbling block we revisited was the fact that an agency’s good creative work gets billed at the same rate as the mediocre – even though ‘good’ is defined as generating response that translates into positive bottom line results. The fear of relevant innovation just keeps on limiting marketing’s true potential.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it think…
Get connected. Focus on results
For B2B marketing to be more commercially effective, marketers could do a lot worse than talking to their colleagues about ‘common purpose’ and the mutual contributions that can be made between functions.
Inclusion rather than exclusion needs to be the name of the game. And perhaps B2B marketers need to get more connected with their colleagues in order to get more connected with the market.
Otherwise, a hard rain’s a-gonna keep on falling.
Back to The Long Hello: making B2B marketing work for the bottom line
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
