Two web pages I read this week made me wonder if people in marketing actually understand what’s going on around them. The first was a press release from the technology consultancy Gartner, which showed that marketing budgets have flatlined over the past couple of years as company bosses are less convinced that their marketing is working. Meanwhile, Marketing Week magazine is reporting that the vast majority of people in marketing believe that their budgets are going to rise.
On one side, you have CEOs saying “you’re not getting any more money until you prove your worth,” and on the other, you have the marketers saying “we’re so valuable to the business they are bound to increase our budgets”. Those are diametrically opposing views.
These positions are summed up in the quote from the 19th Century department store owner, John Wanamaker, who said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half”. These days, marketers will say that is nonsense because they can collect all kinds of data to help establish what is working and what is not worthwhile pursuing.
The trouble is, the bosses are not convinced. Dig into the data provided by Gartner and you find that more than half of the CEOs surveyed do not believe that their marketing directors are producing the goods for them. Indeed, 69% of the CEOs say that six in ten marketing directors “failed to produce the promised results”. The majority of CEOs also said that marketing leaders do not adapt to change and 54% of the company bosses agreed that the marketers do not get any respect from the firm’s leadership.
Wow. Marketing is clearly not getting its message across in the C-suite. And if marketing leaders cannot market their own worth to their colleagues, what hope is there for them marketing their firm’s products or services?
In one of my lectures on digital marketing I show students a chart which reveals what marketers say are their current problems in the workplace. The people in marketing are not concerned with producing their content. Nor do they find the budgets they work with a particular problem. What they find most difficult is “creating awareness”.
The old-fashioned notion of “AIDA” in marketing starts with “Awareness”. AIDA means “Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action”. It is a rather simplistic notion, with much research showing this is not the hierarchical way in which we purchase things. Even so, getting awareness of your product or service is clearly essential. And that, say the marketers, is the most difficult part of their job. The first part.
The reason marketers say this is difficult is because it is. The world has moved on since the days of John Wanamaker. All he had to worry about was distributing enough handbills and having some newspaper advertisements published. The plethora of places in which marketers need to work has grown substantially. It makes their life complicated, for sure.
So, what do we all do when we face complex issues? We try to solve them. And that’s precisely what marketers do. However, research from a decade ago shows that when we face complicated issues, our performance declines, and we also tend to invest more time in trying to find a solution than is economically beneficial. In other words, as marketers try to impress their bosses by solving the awareness problem, their actions make it less likely that they reach a solution.
CEOs are clearly finding that marketing leaders are not providing much benefit to their firms. That’s because those marketing directors are trying to solve the complex issues they face. No doubt, when they leave the boardroom after another grilling, they say, “But they just don’t understand how difficult it is”.
As in all complex things, going back to basics helps. Marketing’s job is one thing – to produce more sales. If your marketing efforts do not produce any sales, you are not marketing, but probably just doing your hobby of adding lovely-looking content to social media. One thing marketers need to do to prove their worth is to walk into the boardroom with a single chart. It would show what the marketing team spent their money on and the amount of additional sales created as a result. Do that, and your boardroom colleagues will respect you. Tell them you have a complicated job, that marketing is difficult and then give them a range of charts showing all kinds of online data, and they will lose the will to live.
