Marketing: Too Many are Failing the Practical

I was once hired by a multi-national to spend two days training their senior managers in marketing. The client had a reputation for having outstanding employees and the biographies of the course participants were very impressive. While none of the group had any direct experience in marketing, their seniority and qualifications were excellent.

By the end of the first day I was struggling. We had reviewed examples of good and bad marketing practice and looked at a whole raft of case studies and concluded with what I hoped would be a triumphant revelation: marketing is all about finding out who your customers are, discovering what they want and then making sure they get it.

The problem for the group was that this sounded extremely obvious. Worse still, it appeared a relatively simple goal to achieve. Over dinner on that first evening one participant even wondered aloud how it was possible to spend four years studying for a PhD in Marketing if the subject was so simple.

I failed. I failed so badly that as I flew home at the end of the course I even wondered to myself whether marketing really was that difficult after all. The following week, however, I took a consulting job with a client that, like the majority of British businesses, had no idea about marketing. It had a tremendous advertising campaign (and budget to boot) and a swanky new logo, but failed all my revelatory tests of marketing competence. The client had very little idea who its customers were, certainly no clue as to what these mysterious individuals wanted and consequently, despite healthy sales figures, no real idea what value it was providing.

Marketing is a simple subject. Listen to your customers and do something about it is hardly a complex mantra. Yet this simplicity masks a complex practical challenge.

The reason marketing is so hard to execute is because of all the practical barriers that spring up when an organisation attempts to listen to customers and then change the way it does business as a result. It costs money.

It takes time. The sales force won't grant us access to the customers. We are afraid to find out bad news. We don't know who our customers are, so we can't listen to them. Customers might want something we don't provide.

Customers don't want to talk to us and don't seem to know what they want even when they do.

This is the true challenge of marketing: breaking down the practical barriers that emerge to prevent us from fulfilling our most important remit. Our focus is the customer and our first job is removing any impediments that prevent us from maintaining that focus.

Paradoxically, the more senior a marketer becomes, the less direct interaction they have with their customers. As your relative power as a marketer increases, so do the barriers that prevent you knowing your customers.

These days I don't begin my marketing classes or workshops by telling managers to listen to customers. Instead I start by asking them why they don't and then what they are going to do about it.

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