Creativity. It’s what sets marketing apart from all of the other functional groups within the enterprise. While other professions rely on spreadsheets and repeatable procedures to get work done, marketing can leverage that one additional dimension to make a big impact.
W H I T E P A P E R CLOSING THE MARKETING CREDIBILITY GAP
WHITE PAPER
OCTOBER 2007
Closing the Marketing Credibility GapCreativity. It's what sets marketing apart from all of the other functional groups within the enterprise. While other professions rely on spreadsheets and repeatable procedures to get work done, marketing can leverage that one additional dimension to make a big impact. Magic moments like the "Where's the Beef" commercial from the 1970s not only put Wendy's on the map, they became an integral part of the American culture.Unfortunately, this unique dimension of the marketing profession also contributes to the credibility gap with the business sponsors that give it life. Increasingly, these business sponsors are demanding accountability for results and visibility into the processes that give birth to powerful marketing campaigns. Businesses simply are no longer willing to write a blank check and trust that something good happens when marketing launches tactics with vaguely defined goals and poor insight into the measurable outcomes. While the world of marketing continues to evolve, creativity is not an endangered species. Senior marketing thought leaders see that creativity (art) must be combined with measurement and rigorous methods (science) to reach its maximum potential. Research with senior executives revealed that an overwhelming 80 percent of respondents thought that art and science must work together for marketing to be most effective.Much of this gap relates to the love/hate relationship that marketing has had with its technology counterparts. In the late 1990s, the giant wave of investment in Y2K-driven upgrades left the marketing landscape untouched. This author once heard a CIO at a Fortune 100 company tell a group of marketing executives, "As of January 1, 2000, we can still pump oil, we just can't bill anyone for it. If you marketers can show me that your call center cross-sell project has a higher ROI than that, I am all ears. Otherwise you'll have to wait until we've addressed all of our Y2K issues." Not only was that the end of the project, it was likely the end of a good working relationship between marketing and technology. The gap between the promise of marketing and its inability to communicate value is at the root of problems relating to turnover and organizational dynamics. At 23 months, the average tenure of a CMO is the shortest of any of the CxO suite. While this statistic is usually viewed in a purely negative fashion, it partially represents the demand in the marketplace for great marketers-those that can deliver impact and document the results back to the business. While undoubtedly much of this turnover is driven by marketing's inability to deliver results, some of it is also driven by high demand for marketing skills that can drive top-line results. Bright silver definitely lines this cloud. When marketing can bridge the credibility gap, the potential for contributing at a strategic level remains high.The news coming from the customer side is not all that positive either. Research from Gartner showed that 40 percent of customers surveyed had taken proactive actions to avoid marketing communications. And these are not your father's channel surfers either. These are a new breed of consumers who have become quite adept at avoiding the best attempts of marketing to interrupt their life and slam in a sponsored message. They will spend money for services such as TiVo just so they enjoy programming without the inserts from marketing. The age of interrupt marketing may finally be at hand.W H I T E P A P E R
Because of the low priority assigned to marketing by IT and IT's fundamental lack of understanding of the marketing process (they might say that marketing has no processes), surprisingly only spotty progress has been made in the past fifteen years. Most of the advances in marketing technology have been focused on analytics and channel-specific point solutions ranging from direct marketing to e-mail to the Web. Another enterprise software product category, customer relationship management (CRM), has also attempted to annex marketing as a third leg of its stool alongside or underneath sales force and call center automation. While many marketing organizations do perform functions that intersect with core CRM processes (call center cross-sell campaigns for example), the vast majority of marketing spend and human reso... [download for more]
