Where is marketing heading?

Let's keep the provocative tone going. Just about every aspect of a major company's operation has undergone enormous change over the last 20 years.

Advances in automation have made real time information available. Processes have been re-engineered and there has been downsizing, rightsizing and supply chain management has been optimized and many more significant changes.

In the middle of this change, marketing has seemingly escaped. After all it is an art and not a science - correct? We can undertake disciplines like research but it is usually about quantification or attitudes and behaviours.

These steps help marketers in the battle to understand better how to win the hearts and minds of consumers, so we are dealing with issues that help define, build and grow brands.

Against these heady thoughts let's consider the following remarks:


• 'branding isn't working as well- generic goods are gaining market share


• traditional advertising isn't working as effectively as in the past


• product innovation is easily copied - competitors can develop similar products in 3 months or less'

These comments were made by a senior product manager from Procter & Gamble at a Customer Relationship Management conference in 2003 (don't worry at this passing reference we will look at the dreaded acronym CRM in future articles). In 2003 P&G spent almost $6 billion on advertising. Just stop for a moment and reflect on the size of the advertising spend. If P&G is saying and experiencing these things then something serious is going on, and spending your way out of it is not the answer.

1997 McKinsey research provides another strong clue - 20 years ago marketing represented15-25% compared to manufacturing in organizations. Now marketing represents 50% - the figures are indicating something highly important. As other elements of a companies performance have been redeveloped to face the challenges of the future, and costs carefully controlled, marketing has gone in the opposite direction.

Marketing is a $450 billion global industry and yet because of the conventional wisdom that it is an art and not a science we are all making major decisions with less data and discipline than we would apply to a $100,000 investment decision in other parts of our business.

Because marketing is an art Finance Directors have been kept at bay by marketers, but now the numbers are so great that FD's are saying 'justify this expenditure - show me the return on investment' This is going down the road of accountability, something that many marketers want to avoid. But the process is starting.

Over the last 6 months I have heard the following many times - 'We have changed our advertising agency but we seem to have to spend more to get the same results as we did in the past'

I hope we can all see the common thread that appears to be emerging. Marketing needs to understand how and where to spend money to optimize results.

In other words it has to start finding suitable key performance indicators that are relevant for the business and that can be tracked to determine performance.

The good news is that there are tools and processes available and some of them have been rigorously tested to demonstrate that they really can help to optimize marketing and deliver added profits to the bottom line. Marketing is no longer a separate silo, but is becoming wholly integrated into the whole business process.

In conclusion to my first article, I think we can say that marketing is definitely moving towards being a mixture of art and science - let's use the phrase 'marketing alchemy'. By all means take a look at our website where we provide our diagrammatic model of what we believe a marketing value chain might look like (www.trueim.com)

In the next article - we will begin to explore some of the answers to the questions raised here. Naturally True Integrated Marketing would like to hear your views and any feedback on this topic which is really impacting all of us marketers.