Marketing Under Threat - Is the ‘marketing department’ extinct
After yet another bout of Covid and starting a new role as Visiting Lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire , the Seven Heads blog coughs and splutters back into life in 2024 discussing the future of one of the most misunderstood and maligned functions - marketing.
Introduction
For many years, marketers have been complaining about their lack of presence in the boardroom. Now,recent research conducted shows that the Marketing department is struggling to find its place in many organisations. Yet organisations have never needed to be better at marketing. So what is going on?
For full disclosure, I’m a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) and a Chartered Marketer with a post-graduate qualification. I’m also the former chair of the Levitt Group, which is the special interest group for Senior Marketers within CIM. I’ve invested thousands of hours in my marketing training and continued professional development. I use that marketing training pretty much every single day in either work with clients or in my own business.
I’ve obviously got a vested interest in marketing surviving and thriving as a profession. However I rarely refer to the tools and techniques as marketing per se. I don’t even call myself a marketer, and for good reason. Marketing doesn’t have a great reputation among CEOs and in the boardroom, so it’s safer to change the message to suit the audience. Turns out that this is a good move.
The Research
While Chair of the Levitt Group, I was asked for our help by Dr Keith Glanfield and his colleagues in recruiting senior marketers to participate in the research. Our observation within the Levitt Group was that many of our members were not working as marketing managers in a classic functional head role ‘doing marketing’. Many, like myself, were consultants or freelancers, and those that worked in-house struggled to practise marketing in the way that we were taught.
The research paper ‘Marketing Practice; Is Marketing putting itself under threat?’ was launched this week at Oxford Brookes University. Some of the findings were as follows
Marketing has undergone huge change in the last 30 years due to changes in the marketplace, technology, and the demands of the organisation e.g. CRM, data analytics, more channels to market.
Markets are increasingly observing a declining presence in the boardroom and the profession receiving less regard and more criticism from other professions. There is a ‘feeling’ of the profession losing professional influence.
Marketers ‘feel’ they are constrained, cannot practise the profession the way they’d like to and are forced to be tactical vs strategic. Other professions, more than ever, are conducting marketing work and making marketing decisions.
There are easy side-ways entries into the profession and the general perception of marketing can be ‘learnt on the job’ leading to reducing influence at senior and middle management level.
All in all, marketers are feeling an ever increasing level of strain, tension, challenge and conflict.
My own experiences chime somewhat with these findings. I’ve not had the word marketing in any job title for over 20 years. If I’m asked to describe what I do in 30 secs, I’ll say that I’m a consultant working in the broad area of strategy and transformational change because marketing means very different things to different companies and often the word ‘marketing’ can have negative connotations with CXOs, which in turn makes my life extremely difficult.
The Dilemma
At first glance, the findings from the report would seem somewhat bizarre. After all, ‘marketing is the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably’ as defined by CIM. Have we suddenly no need for marketing in organisations?
Is Marketing Dead?
The answer, or at least some explanation, can be found in two classic texts - Marketing Myopia written by Theodore Levitt (1965) and ‘The Nature of the Firm’ written by Ronald Coase (1937).
Firstly Levitt’s text encourages us to look at the underlying customer need and the customer here is the organisation. The organisation needs to identify, anticipate and satisfy customer requirements profitably. The organisational need is not a marketing department per se.
Coase’s text says that firms are a response to the ‘exchange costs’ of using markets. Negotiating and enforcing separate contracts for every transaction has a cost in time and money. We can also apply this thinking to functions. We put marketing activities into marketing functions because it made sense to bundle all ‘marketing activities’ into the same place.
However, in recent years we’ve seen a number of trends that work against marketing functions. Firstly technology has introduced multiple touchpoints with the customere.g. contact centres, mobile apps etc, which reduces marketing’s role as the natural voice of the customer.
The same technology advances enable operations to move some functions away from marketing and embed them into operations e.g. market research, customer journey, data analytics. The complexity of many of the simpler tasks e.g. a new web page, a customer satisfaction service survey has decreased. It’s easy enough just to add one into an e-commerce process and, if it doesn’t work, you can keep changing it until it does! N.B. This doesn’t mean this is the best way to do it!
As advertising has moved away from more complex media like print and physical mailings to web and social media, so have the ‘exchange costs’ of working with 3rd parties. For some frequent tasks, like social media advertising, PR etc, it’s far easier to work with a fractional resource than in the past e.g. a company I work with doesn’t have a ‘marketing budget’ or a ‘marketing manager’ but it’s placing Google ads, doing PR and social media to a very high standard, and has a distinctive brand design. For infrequent tasks like brand refreshers, an organisation has far more external choice because they can source online and, often at a lower level, the work can be done remotely. .
While marketing tasks are being nibbled away at the bottom, corporate strategy roles and Chief of Staff roles continue to erode marketing’s importance at the top. In startups and early rounds, gaining market fit is typically more the remit of the Board vs a marketing function as it’s existential to survival. Without market fit, future rounds of fundraising and marketing budgets are either low or non-existent. Anticipating customer needs in tech can be the role of the product manager or the requested list of enhancements. Set up a forum for engaged customers and they’ll tell you the needs!
Clearly, within very large organisations and B2C in particular, marketing as a function still makes huge sense because of the scale and complexity of work. However, in many other organisations, marketing is seen no longer as a strategic process but a set of defined tasks related to customer acquisition, retention and communication that are required within the business. In that environment, marketing as a management function and as a profession is alway going to struggle.
Long Live Marketing
While all of the above may leave marketers feeling very insecure about their own roles and marketing as a profession in general, there’s more than ever a need for outstanding marketing in the modern world. In a world where innovation is copied rapidly, real differentiation is much more difficult.
While it’s possible to do some kind of a decent job with far less and more junior resources, doing an outstanding one requires a fundamental understanding of how a company employs the 7Ps across the organisation to best effect.
However, marketers will need to create legitimacy and be able to better navigate the business and political environments they find themselves in. This needs a radical shift of thinking from marketers and professional bodies.
How Can Marketing Respond?
Much of the stress around marketing is caused by marketers' own expectations of marketing and an institutional one size fits all view of marketing. There has been an over concentration on big brands, B2C marketing and marketing communications and, by implication, big marketing organisations.
That model is unsustainable. Smaller businesses, B2B, startups etc with different needs will need to be considered differently rather than just as scaled down versions. Marketing may not even be on an advisory basis or on a fractional basis. Full time resources will need to be able to fit with the organisation rather than the other way around.
It follows therefore that we need to think about marketing careers and recruitment differently. The homogenous view of the profession internally as a ‘classical FMCG type marketer’ progression whereby there is a steady ladder of progress through skills into management. Marketing for most may be more of a squiggly career.
There’s a current emphasis on more junior marketers and skills/qualifications because that’s how professional bodies finance themselves. However, there’s a question about the long term value those qualifications are adding to both individuals and the profession if those skills aren’t permanently being refreshed.
There’s less of an emphasis on senior marketers and advanced marketing / strategic skills because the needs as we can see here are so disparate, yet this is where marketing adds most value in terms of organisation capability and differentiation.
The profession needs to address the skills discontinuity between the emphasis on hard branding and marcoms skills and the strategic consulting, influencing skills and oversight that companies really need at Board level.
If marketing doesn’t have a standard mandate to operate as a function or strategically in this new multiverse that the research has highlighted, then marketers need a framework of functional and leadership skills and deep strategic thinking to be able to carve out a role that adds real value and demonstrates expertise.
There are clearly career implications for individuals. More may move out into freelance or fractional roles whilst those that remain in the corporate environment will need to be able to better assess business environments so that career moves better meet their own aspirations.
Professional bodies will need to rethink how they better service those diverse member needs as seniority increases and promote the profession to non marketers.
Conclusions
The current research shows a huge problem in marketing and it’s easy to speculate that the widespread introduction of AI will only increase the anxiety that marketers are feeling. Far more is needed to enable marketers to thrive and not just survive but marketers will need to do the heavy lifting. This will need marketers, their professional bodies and universities to prepare marketers for a more volatile world.
I use strategy and change consulting skills together with extensive cross functional and cross industry experience to help businesses plan and manage change. If you want to talk about any aspect of strategy, ops, marketing and change, please feel free to contact me via LinkedIn where you can also book a call.