Marketing Rule No. 1
Take charge of your marketing.
Nobody cares about your success like you do, not an ad agency, not a marketing director. Don’t leave your marketing oversight to others.
Over the past 30 years or so, there has been a subtle but crucial change in the number of companies managing their advertising, public relations, and marketing.
Before the 1980s, marketing used to be a C-level activity. It was considered so important to the continued success of a business that it was directly supervised by the CEO of the company or at least an executive vice president.
In recent years, the CEO’s focus has shifted almost entirely to driving earnings for shareholders in the short term. Where once the director of a company had perhaps five to ten years to prove his worth, today CEOs are hired and fired with the profit results of a few quarters.
The result is that marketing has been diverted to lower-ranking officials in the business, such as a marketing director or communications officer, often a junior executive who may not have much real influence within the company.
A second factor is that by emphasizing transitory gains over long-term growth, jobs within the organization have also become more short-term, tied to quarterly earnings. Today, marketing jobs in many companies are considered simply a temporary “job”, a stepping stone to something better.
The result is that marketing in quite a few companies these days is being managed by:
a person with less experience;
or often young;
or with little interest in consistency or long-term results
You are often more concerned with promoting yourself for your NEXT position.
The chief marketing officer will generally transfer responsibility for the company’s marketing to an advertising agency or public relations firm. First, because the chief marketing officer lacks the training and experience to get the job done, and second, because hired gunmen can take the blame if the company misses its revenue targets.
Small and medium-sized businesses are not as bad at this as corporations, but the weakness is that the owner-entrepreneur is often torn between having to manage money and people, network for new customers, and sometimes even reply. the phones, that you can entrust the promotion of the company to a relative, friend or almost ANYONE who can get rid of it.
Put all of these flaws together and you understand why a lot of marketing today is bland, sure-it-me-too-ism, or otherwise wildly inconsistent as new marketing managers and agencies go back and forth. They come in bursts of a year.
Marketing must be supervised at the highest level of authority in the company or it will be prone to failure. No one, not a marketing director, not an advertising agency, cares about the success of the business like the owner or the director.
Marketing managers care about looking good, or at least not looking bad. People in agencies are more concerned with increasing the income of their companies. Sure, everyone hopes to build the company, but if not, well, let’s go to the next business. After all, you don’t gamble with your money.
If it is your money that goes into marketing, it is foolish to leave the oversight of that effort to anyone but yourself. That certainly does not mean that the CEO of the company should issue press releases or respond to all comments on the company blog, but she SHOULD check regularly that those things are being done in a manner consistent with her vision, objectives and long-term image of the company.
