Does marketing smell bad? Or is it maybe even dead? There have been a number of articles recently that question the marketer's ability to make sense of his/her somewhat wishy-washy role. BusinessWeek reveled in the "short life of the CMO," and McKinsey Quarterly provided some stats that reveal how much today's marketing executives are grappling with the new social media environment, arguing that "many chief marketers still have narrowly defined roles that emphasize advertising, brand management, and market research." No wonder even marketing guru Seth Godin has turned negative and asks in his new book whether "your marketing is out of sync."
Clearly, marketing needs some serious marketing. Conferences that seek to redefine (and thus strengthen) marketing's role are therefore burgeoning: The American Marketing Association offers seminars such as "Beyond Marketing 2.0: Harnessing the Power of Social Media for Marketing Campaign Results," Forrester's Marketing Forum 2008 heralds "engagement" as the profession's "new imperative for success," and the humbly titled THE Conference on Marketing (well, I guess it makes sense if you consider marketing the function of superlatives) aspires to be the penultimate forum for marketing leaders who "seek certainty in experimental times." In the meantime, Seth Godin has it all figured out and presents "14 trends marketers need to embrace to avoid eating meatball sundaes" (via BNET):
"1. Direct Communication - there is a trend towards an increase in direct communication between producers and consumers. More feedback mechanisms are appearing.
2. Amplifying the Voice of Individuals - power to the people. Everyone has become a critic. This can be a good thing. Viral is all the rage.
3. The Idea of having an Authentic Story - (...) the fact that there are scraps of material out there and the need for having an authentic story to tell.
4. Lack of Attention Span - have we trained people to have shorter attention spans? (...) in the 40's commercials used to be 30 minutes long. Is the 30 second spot still an efficient way to educate potential prospects and consumers about your product and services? Just how successful are those Super Bowl commercials anyway? So long as the ads generate revenue, does it matter?
5. All About the Long-Tail - there is a definite trend towards long-tail and providing a choice for people.
6. Outsourcing - there is a definite trend towards outsourcing. (...) "… it can be easier to change the manual than to change the people…"
7. Google and the Other Search Engines are "atomizing" the World - the fact that bundling (all of your services) may not and does not always work.
8. Infinite Channels of Information - a.k.a. creating noise. I like to call this “touch points” or interception points. This creates the elimination of a bottleneck as you should build and create your own channels (and no I’m not talking about Yahoo Pipes).
9. Consumers Can Talk Directly to other Consumers - power to the people part two.
10. Shift in Scarcity and Abundance - stuff that used to be abundant is now scarce and vice versa.
11. Big Idea can reach a large number of people - a big idea is something that changes the world or the big idea's direct environment forever.
12. Shift of How Many to Who? - This is huge as 'who' has become much more important than 'How Many.' Mass marketing is seeing a transformation.
13. Identification of who is wealthy and who is not - you cannot always predict who is who.
14. New Gatekeepers and No Gate Keepers - you'll have to read the book for more on this."
All of this is of course easier said than done, and marketers, although typically the early adopters in their organizations, are after all slow movers within the constraints of their mandates. On paper, Godin's recommendations may sound all too familiar for marketing experts, but in reality they are still a hard sell to many CEOs.
Marketers have always been under scrutiny for what they do – now they have also gotten under scrutiny for what they are. It is therefore all the more surprising that it is good old McKinsey which endorses broadening the marketer's role, envisioning him/her as a "strategic activist:"
"As companies confront changing consumer behavior, increasingly important third-party scrutiny, and more diverse target markets and segments, they must broaden the roles of marketing and the CMO. Today, many chief marketers focus mainly on building brands, making advertising more effective, and perhaps market research. Although these responsibilities aren't going away, CMOs must address several other areas as well: leading company-wide change in response to evolving buying patterns, stepping up efforts to shape a company's public profile, managing complexity, and building new marketing capabilities throughout the company as a whole. The relative importance of these new priorities will of course vary by company and industry, but the broad importance of reinventing the CMO's role as a strategic activist is similar across them."
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