Via BrandXpress –
Rob Engelman was recently asked what a Marketing Department should be responsible for. His answer came as a list:
1. Focus on the Customer
2. Monitor the Competition
3. Own the Brand.
4. Find & Direct Outside Vendors.
5. Create New Ideas.
6. Communicate Internally.
7. Manage a Budget.
8. Understand the ROI.
9. Set the Strategy, Plan the Attack, and Execute.
Because we like to focus on brand stuff, here’s what Rob has to say about #3:
“The perceptions and feelings formed about an organization, its products / services, and its performance is what is known as its “brand.” The Marketing Department is responsible for creating meaningful messages through words, ideas, images, and names that deliver upon the promises / benefits an organization wishes to make with its customers. Furthermore, the Marketing Department is responsible for ensuring that messages and images are delivered consistently, by every member of the organization.”
Not a bad start. And for the most part, yes, he is right.
Read the rest of Rob’s points here.
Rob’s list is a great first step for any marketing department that finds itself needing to define its functions clearly. Let’s take it one step further though, with this second list, which should best serve marketing departments that have already accomplished all nine of Rob’s recommendations and are looking for the next step in their evolution:
1. Befriend your customers.
2. Become your market. (Don’t just monitor the competition. Rewrite the rules. Set the pace. Lead. Outdistance your competition. Make them copy you. Force them to up their game.)
3. Breathe your brand.
4. Recruit and direct outside vendors.
5. Foster Innovation.
6. Simplify your internal communications. Then simplify them again. And again. And again.
7. Strategize as if your budget had been slashed in half. Deliver as if your budget had been twice what it actually is.
8. Make your ROI completely clear to your clients and everyone in your organization.
9. Observe, adapt, strategize, anticipate, plan, execute. … and be ready to improvise at a moment’s notice.
If you can truly make this your list for 2009, you will probably blow away your competition. (Recession? What recession? … Exactly.)
Now get to work!
Have a great Wednesday, everyone.
The key is to be in an organization that empowers and supports marketing in these efforts. If the understanding isn’t there from the top down, marketing will not be successful. You will always have to put an “*” next to your efforts and results.
Just wanted to thank you for such a well thought out post – I am about to start a new job as a marketing manager, and these are great tips for me (and anyone else in marketing). I especially agree w/ #9 of the tips: “9. Observe, adapt, strategize, anticipate, plan, execute. … and be ready to improvise at a moment’s notice”…
Being able to roll with the punches and make changes on the fly is so important, but so often overlooked!
Tom, you hit the proverbial nail on the head.
Kirsten, I am glad to hear we have another smart one joining our ranks. 😉
Tom, really nice addition when you say you need to be working with a company or individuals that understand and see the value in time spent on these marketing efforts. Unfortunately it’s often easier said then done I feel but that depends on the company of course.
Olivier, I wanted to ask you to elaborate a bit more on your opinion when he says “own the brand”. My understanding is that the brand can’t be “owned” by a marketing department and that it is more influenced, guided, raised, in the right direction so that the actual brand is seen the way the marketing department wants it to be. Would I be correct in saying that a brand actually can’t be owned?
Sam
“The Marketing Department is responsible for ensuring that messages and images are delivered consistently, by every member of the organization.”
That’s what sticks out to me in anything the marketing department would do. Their efforts and strategy *have* to be understood throughout the entire company, thus creating a culture that your customers can be confident they will see and receive, no matter who they do business with in your company.
You can have one exceptional person that is able to take the reigns and build a strategy around the above points, but if it’s just that one exceptional person and not the rest of the company – it all goes to waste, no?
Enjoyed this post, Olivier!
Sonny, yes. That is a point too often missed or misunderstood by companies and marketing departments. Sam’s point and question are also relevant to yours: Defining ownership of a brand within an organization.
If a mktg dept. looks at owning the brand as a territorial thing, something that is theirs and theirs alone, they will fail. A mktg dept. needs to turn every member of the organization into a brand ambassador, which requires it to take a leadership role in that regard. (Again, I don’t define leadership as a “barking orders” role.) There is education involved, hand holding, communications, culture-building, etc.
Sonny, you hit the nail on the head every time you mention company culture.
Even if one fantastic visionary leader becomes the architect of a brand, the mktg dept.’s role is to help scale that vision across the entire organization and incorporate it into its DNA, one employee at a time. Absolutely.
Sam, the reason I create the second list is because I wasn’t super happy with the first one. “Breathing” the brand (living it) makes more sense to me than “owning” it. In most cases, brands aren’t actually “owned” by the company, but rather by the fans. Look at Harley Davidson. Look at Starbucks, even.
Great example: Starbucks seems to have completely lost touch with its own identity – trying every “growth” idea they can think of but forgetting what made them great. (Let’s see… who should Starbucks be this quarter… A music store? An instant coffee company? A smoothie bar?) What’s interesting is the response from Starbucks fans. We’re all shaking our heads and waving our fists in the air screaming at Starbucks to wake up and… well, smell the coffee. We – the fans – are angry that Starbucks is driving its own brand into the ground. That’s because the Starbucks brand really belongs to us now. Starbucks has become part of our culture, our emotional matrix, and we hate to see someone screw it up for us.
Imagine what would happen if new leadership at Apple started making bonehead decisions. You would have every creative department and ad agency in the world taking to the streets in anger. 😀
So… “breathing” the brand, “living” the brand make more sense to me than “owning” the brand. Marketing departments need to live in their brand’s universe first, be conscious citizens of that universe, if you will, before taking a leadership role when it comes to where to take things next.
🙂
Great advice when it comes to befriending the consumer and setting the rules of the market. It is harder than it sounds, but if you have the right niche market, then it will allow you the market share to do so.
in my point of view marketing is a nice subject and also is my subject because it deals with customer satisfaction
markating departement deals with customer satisfaction and searchs new customers and make them satisfaction with qualaty product and also retantion old customer
what is marketing office and its function?
i really appreciate your good work, am about to recruit new staffs in marketing department and this has given me a great tips on who i will look out for. Thanks
this is good please keep it up, it will help student to carry reseach, and marketers of industries to build on strategies they wil use to pull out competitors out of market.
It was wow reading those tips i am taking a course in marketing and i think it will help me in future,thanks
it will help me a great deal as a marketing student