Feature Article: Building Bridges in Marketing

Something strange is happening in marketing departments. We're seeing headcount cuts despite a resurgence of IT vendor growth. And some vendors have marketing budget but insufficient headcount to use it effectively.

Is this why marketing teams seem unhappy despite the return to growth? Marketing morale used to mirror the business cycle of boom and bust, but not any longer.

What's driving this change? In many ways it's the success of marketing's own PR. The board now believe that marketing is the life blood of the company, that branding and marketing strategy are critical success factors for the business. So much so, that they're not prepared to leave these crown jewels solely in the care of the marketing department. The Sales Team want to play. As the late David Packard of HP said "Marketing is much too important to leave to the marketing department". What a reward for success!

But on the other hand, the execution of marketing communications activity has become more specialised, more varied, more complex and more automated. It's no longer a core competency but a candidate business process for outsourcing to agencies and execution specialists. And the remaining three P's of marketing (Product, Price, and Place) have often become the responsibility of other functions within the organisation.

These movements in strategy and execution open up a gap along the fault line that separates them. They break intrinsic communication bonds between the various functions in the traditional marketing department. No longer is there a seamless connection between strategy and execution. The holistic approach has fractured; a gap has appeared in our marketing process.

As Tim Ambler, senior fellow at the London Business school observed in ft.com last year "Marketing is on the rack…marketers have brought this plight upon themselves by failing to make either of the two professional responses: formal and informal development of the business model."

It's because of this gap that some marketing departments are seen purely as a service function: "they do brochures and events". Once the direct and visible link between corporate objectives and marketing deliverables has gone, it has indeed become a service department, an overhead not a revenue creator.

To bridge the gaps between management, marketing and sales, we need to improve communications and build connections between strategic and tactical plans. Business objectives, marketplace data, and buyer behaviour determine the key parameters on the marketing programmes side: audience, message, channel, cost, return and link to revenue and profit.

In the B2B world, we use our 'Buyer Influence Maps' as one technique for doing this. These maps reflect the behaviour of buyers in complex decision making units (DMU).

Many are already familiar with terms like 'Project Initiator' and 'Economic Buyer' when analysing the workings of the DMU. But there is another dimension. In reality, there are two decisions being made: the decision on whether to buy the solution, then, which vendor to buy it from. Different people may be involved depending on which decision is under discussion. They may be in different functions or even different companies (one may be an outsourcer for instance).

Tactics need to reflect this. The message, audience and channel are all likely to be different when convincing someone to buy the solution, as opposed to influencing someone in their choice of vendor for that solution. Buyer Influence Maps show these two different axes of decision making: deciding on solutions and choosing vendors.

The map reflects how far different companies (DMUs) have progressed towards a solution decision - how far along the solution axis are they? We also show how these same DMUs perceive the vendor. Are they aware of them, would they consider them, do they prefer them - how far along the vendor axis are they? The map illustrates progress from nothing (never heard of the solution, unaware of the vendor) through the sales and marketing process, all the way to closed business. Such maps can go on to form the basis for a rigorous model linking marketing strategy and objectives to the activities to be executed. They provide the basis for communication among the stakeholders.

There's another dimension to this bridging or modelling process: metrics. Metrics can be a either a bridge or a barrier. They can be the lingua franca of the business or akin to the Tower of Babel. They have their disciples and detractors. The economist Robert Chambers covered both viewpoints when he said: "Quantification brings credibility. But figures and tables can deceive, and numbers construct their own realities"

Both views are right. The real question is which metrics to use to reap the benefits of measurement but without the distortion? Peter Drucker neatly summed it up when he said: "Management by objectives works if you first think through your objectives. Ninety percent of the time you haven't."

What's wrong with the usual metrics? On the one hand metrics like budget and headcount are universal across the company but merely represent inputs to the business process.

Then we have the specific performance metrics for our various branches of marketing promotion e.g. OTS (Opportunities To See) in advertising, column inches for PR, response rates for direct marketing and click throughs for the web.

These metrics may be fine for checking the efficiency of execution but they fail on two counts. Firstly, they do not measure the impact of the activity on business objectives (revenue, customer loyalty etc.). And secondly, they are meaningless to anyone outside marketing.

What everyone wants is a set of metrics that demonstrate the effectiveness of marketing in supporting corporate objectives, in terms that are understandable to non-marketers.

Which brings us back to the need for a model to encapsulate the workings of the marketing programme. It should also illustrate the connection between the activity and its impact on business objectives with meaningful metrics.

Perhaps most important of all, building end-to-end connections in this way for your marketing processes increases understanding from all parties, including your external agencies. Results get better and morale improves.

As Kotler says in the introduction to his latest book, "The good news is that marketing will be around forever. It just won't be the way you learned it."

The outlook for marketing is not so bad after all.

Mike Butcher

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