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Perhaps I’m just piddling in semantics, but it really bothers me when the “marketing” term is applied to any and every customer-facing activity. Lately it seems that anyone with a Twitter account is considered “doing marketing.”
The McKinsey Quarterly, published by the international management consultancy McKinsey & Company, is the latest to elevate the claim that “we’re all marketers now” with an article of the same name. In fact, authors Tom French, Laura LaBerge, and Paul Magill make some relatively lofty proclamations (emphasis original):
At the end of the day, customers no longer separate marketing from the product—it is the product. They don’t separate marketing from their in-store or online experience—it is the experience. In the era of engagement, marketing is the company.
While I agree with the general spirit of the authors’ conclusions, I think invoking marketing alone to address changing customer behavior is a mistake.
Let me explain.
Marketing is not the product
To say that “customers no longer separate marketing and product” (emphasis mine) is a bit of a stretch. The best marketing has always been about product, though it’s better phrased, “the product is the marketing.”
Fans of Seth Godin will remember that “product is marketing” is the central thesis to Purple Cow (taken from the Fast Company excerpt):
The old rule was this: Create safe products and combine them with great marketing. Average products for average people. That’s broken. The new rule is: Create remarkable products that the right people seek out.
Godin is right, products that are remarkable make marketing a breeze (think iPad), but most businesses still settle to produce average products for average people. Godin is also right in saying that combining average products with great marketing doesn’t always work, not because marketing and product have somehow morphed into one another, but because people are more adept at seeing through marketing that’s simply a veneer on a crappy product.
The point: consumers want remarkable products, not just marketing.
In another article, also posted in the McKinsey Quarterly, John Hayes, CMO of American Express explains it this way,
I had a conversation recently with an employee about this new age of marketing. Basically, it went like this: “As we try to go to market with your idea,” I said, “the world is going to decide whether or not this has real value, talk about it, and then position it pretty much how they want to position it.” The person responded, “OK, so we really have lost control?” I said, “Yes, that’s right. I don’t get to control everything that’s said about us.” Then I said to the person, “But understand, you’re still 100 percent accountable for the outcome.”
Gasp! People have the power to determine if our products are actually valuable? Oh no!
We must consider that when marketers lament a “loss of control” what they really mean is not just a loss of control over results, but a loss of control over consumers. They mean a loss of ability to dupe and manipulate people into buying their products.
So as marketers are finding that tactics in their old bag of tricks (think mass mediated advertising, spray-and-pray direct mail, etc.) are steadily getting less efective, they’re forced to consider how the task of marketing relates to the rest of business practice—from generating better product ideas to improving customer service.
And because marketers often have their necks on the chopping block when it comes to producing results, they’re rightly motivated to extend their influence throughout the rest of the organization.
Though I think, “If good marketing leads to higher sales, then more marketing throughout our organizations should mean more sales” is tantamount to “if one pill makes me feel a little better, then a bunch of pills will make me feel really great.”
Marketing is not the company
Perhaps the most useful conclusion of French, LaBerge, and Magill’s article is a call to take a fresh look at mapping out how customers interact with entire organizations, not just business groups (including marketing):
…companies will be better off if they stop viewing customer engagement as a series of discrete interactions and instead think about it as customers do: a set of related interactions that, added together, make up the customer experience. That perspective should stimulate fresh dialogue among members of the senior team about who should design the overall system of touch points to create compelling customer engagement, and who then builds, operates, and renews each touch point consistent with that overall vision.
We’ve seen this type of thinking manifest itself in other ways before, and we’ve seen that organizations do better when they can can break down silos between work groups (like sales and marketing).
What’s different about this approach is that the motivation is customer focused, not operations focused. The authors are saying that it’s important to break down silos not just for efficiency’s sake, but for the sake of providing the best possible experience to customers.
Unfortunately, the authors have given the responsibility of orchestrating complete customer focus to marketing, and more specifically to the task of marketing:
To engage customers whenever and wherever they interact with a company—in a store; on the phone; responding to an e-mail, a blog post, or an online review—marketing must pervade the entire organization. [...]
As marketing becomes more pervasive, the marketing organization will increasingly be defined by a core set of tightly held responsibilities, such as branding and agency relationships, and a set of responsibilities distributed among the functions and groups best placed to manage and use the information generated by customer interactions.
But why make marketing more pervasive? Instead of reexamining the whole idea of real customer interaction, the authors have simply extended the authority and experience of marketing to communicate with customers to the whole organization.
While I agree that marketing groups seem to currently have the best tools for collecting and analyzing things like customer insights and deep data about customer habits and activities, we need to be very careful about how we define the role and scope of marketing.
Rather than morphing into “marketing organizations,” shouldn’t we strive to become “customer-focused organizations”?
The customer-focused organization
The terms “marketing” and “customer focus” send drastically different rhetorical signals.
Sure, marketing is, in some sense, “customer focused, ” but dress it up however you want—with pretty pictures and flowery copy about how much you love your customers (i.e. people who buy stuff from you)—at the end of the day, plain and simple, marketing is about selling.
Does anyone honestly believe your loyalty program, coupon, price cut, whatever, is about serving customers? No, those are about sales.
Selling is arguably the most important action in capitalist businesses, but selling doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Put another way, how many mission statements just say, “we exist to make a lot of money and that’s it”? It’s true that many talk about “maximizing shareholder value,” (code for “make a lot of money”), but there’s usually something attached that addresses what the business does for customers.
If we accept that we can no longer separate product from marketing because marketing-as-veneer doesn’t work, then doesn’t it make sense for us to invest not in marketing, but in creating products and experiences that delight our customers?
Starting from the premise that an organization is “customer-focused” gives leaders the opportunity to say, “everything we do, all of our efforts together are about creating a product or delivering a service that will add meaning and value in the lives of our customers.”
If there’s one thing that humans share it’s our propensity and thirst for meaning. We ask “what is the meaning of life?” “Why am I here?” “What is my purpose?” Even the nihilists ponder the questions.
Meaning is what fuels organized religion and fundraisers for cancer research. Meaning is why we exchange wedding vows. It’s what fuels our understanding of morality, justice, peace and love.
Our desire for meaning doesn’t suddenly shut off when we go to work. In fact one of the chapters of Hill and Linebacks Being the Boss, a great introduction to leadership and management from the Harvard Business School Press, is devoted to appealing to a common sense of purpose—a sense of meaning—among the people you lead.
If marketing is about selling to customers, meaning is about connecting with them.
I’ll be you can guess which is closer to addressing the new era of engagement that French, LaBerge, and Magill talk about.
The author’s recommendations for action—for organizations to cut down silos in order to distribute more customer-facing activities throughout our organizations, form more councils and partnerships, elevate the value of customer insights and gather richer data for deeper analysis, these are all good and worthy suggestions.
I just think they should be done in the name of serving the customer, not in the name of making marketing more pervasive.
So rather than say that we’re all marketers now, I think we should say that we’re all responsible for providing value to customers. How we talk about this issue really is important.
Our choice of words sends a clear signal to our shareholders, to our employees, to our customers about what we really value.
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keywords: customer engagement, Marketing, McKinsey Quarterly, Purple Cow, rhetoric, semantics, snarky retort
