The new world of marketing frightens many experienced marketing professionals.
For those accustomed to believing that they have some form of inalienable right to control everything that is said or published about their firm in the name of “managing the brand,” these are difficult times, indeed.
As individuals and groups inside organizations seek to tap into the many remarkable and generally free tools to connect, engage and converse with their audiences, old-line marketing managers increasingly lash out and assert their power in the name of the brand.
Someone forgot to share the memo that everything changed. (Does anyone send memos anymore?)
The Experienced Marketing Manager’s Last Grip on the Old World:
- “How will I protect the brand?”
- “How do I ensure that people don’t say the wrong things?”
- “How do I ensure message consistency?”
- “How do I ensure that people perceive us as in our true light…the way I open every press release? You know…it goes something like, “Acme, a market leader in…”
4 Marketing Management Practices that Stifle and Smother:
1. Social media policies that reflect the tone: “this stuff is dangerous and we’re going to control what you do.”
2. Arcane and insane approval processes that require marketing to approve everything that is communicated externally. (Aaaargggghhhh!)
3. An attitude of, “I own the brand.” Bull. Your customers own your brand…your institution decides how it is perceived through transactions and experiences.
4. A reliance on old-line interruption-focused marketing tactics, where you choose the time and place to attempt to engage your audience.
The New Tasks of Today’s Marketing Manager:
- You should work tirelessly to ensure that you have a well-defined positioning and messaging strategy that means something to the people that count. Emphasis on the last few words of that sentence.
- You should work hard to engage your employees and colleagues in understanding and spreading this message.
- You should absolutely monitor customer and marketplace response to your message and your value proposition, and you should keep it fresh and relevant.
- You should focus on providing every way possible for your people to build value, create visibility, make connections and to monitor and engage in discussions about what’s important to your business and to your customers. Teach your people about the new tools of marketing and encourage experimentation and learning.
Oh, and I have no qualms about you ensuring that pages and blogs and profiles incorporate your well-honed messaging and your logo standards. And of course, people need to conduct themselves as professionals and have the modicum of common sense that it requires not to divulge inappropriate information.
After that, get over it.
It’s this last point that frightens the marketing control types.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Marketing has always been too important to be left to the marketing department. It’s an institution wide activity that support’s Peter Drucker’s purpose of an enterprise: “To acquire and keep customers.” Marketing manager, sorry, but you don’t own marketing. You are the proprietor of a set of activities and you are an enabler of marketing processes, but you most definitely don’t own marketing.
While there are perils and potential time-wasters in this new world of communication and connection sufficient to merit some amount of worrying, the best solution is to shift your attitude from “How can this stuff hurt us and what do I have to prevent?” to “How can this stuff help us and what do I have to train/educate/enable?”
You cannot control your way through a world where everyone else is talking to everyone else. Somewhere out there, a group of people that you care about is exchanging ideas on things that they care about.
Are your people listening and engaging? Or, are they still waiting for you to decide that it’s safe to open the gates of your marketing fortress?
Art, your right about the inability to control the things you can’t control and marketing being an “institution wide activity.” I’m a believer that the entire operation is at the core of marketing. When the message does not align, when the company talks-the-talk but doesn’t walk-the-walk, marketing campaigns fail and brands get slammed.
Wouldn’t you love to see a campaign message like, “We sell cheap so don’t expect service.”
Thanks, Gary! Love your thinking and yes, I would love to see that campaign. -Art
There is a show known as Mad Men that has won emmys and golden globes addressing many topics of both the age and the topic of marketing. In the show the marketing agents and creators are doing just as you suggest, trying to control the market for which the product is being placed and pushed. However, I think at that time the consumer had little choice. As technology and the many variances of any single item advances so do the choices of the consumer. And thus, the power of the marketer is greatly reduced. To a point of marketing is now needed to spark interest instead of guide loyalty. Perhaps as time progresses the notion of what marketing is will change as well.
Alexander, thanks for the thoughtful comment. -Art
I could not agree more.I espeically like the point you made about people conducting themselves in a professional manner. You should make sure that your staff is on point. But as long as your corporation is doing what they should the control of marketing and especially social media does not need to be so controlled.
Art, great blog post. I love the “new rules”, particularly this one – “You should work hard to engage your employees and colleagues in understanding and spreading this message.” I am amazed by companies who freak out about the lack of control over their brand (due to the new marketing world created by social media); and yet, these are the same corporations who do nothing to educate and empower employees to be their brand ambassadors.