This is an odd chapter title, especially in a book about marketing that's written for a readership including a high proportion of marketers. It's difficult to believe that an equivalent would be required in a book about any other large corporate department – IT, say, or HR.¹

In financial services at least, when it comes to the role of marketing this kind of uncertainty is prevalent within firms as a whole, and indeed within marketing departments in particular. In all our research and discussions, we met few marketing people – up to and including some very senior marketing directors – who had a clear sense of what they and their departments were and were not supposed to be doing.²

Few, in fact, had any agreed definition of what marketing actually is, shared either within their own departments or within their businesses as a whole. This was a surprise to us, and not in a good way. How can you set goals for marketing if you can't agree on what it is? How can you successfully measure the effectiveness of what you've done if you don't know what you should be measuring?

This is clearly an issue to be tackled sooner rather than later. It wouldn't be easy to write comprehensibly about how marketing needs to change if there wasn't any clarity or consensus on what it is, and what it does now.

We couldn't think of a better starting-point than the definition provided by the professional body for UK marketers, the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM).

They've clearly – and necessarily – given it a lot of thought. Reading what they've come up with, it's easy to imagine the workings of the subcommittee of members tasked with coming up with something, labouring for long hours over working lunches of Pret sandwiches and bottles of Highland Spring water, covering countless flipcharts and sticky notes in their quest for the perfect form of words. In the end, we imagine, they came back in triumph to the management committee with a single sheet of paper bearing the following lovingly-crafted sentence:

Marketing is the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably.

And let's say straightaway that we don't think they did too badly at all.

Mischievously, we can't resist a little speculation about the drafting process. We suspect, on the basis of absolutely not a shred of evidence, that certain words and phrases in the finished product were absent from the first draft but emerged along the way in response to specific concerns, comments and criticisms:

• Management process, for example, is a term that we suspect is intended to imply that marketing is a proper part of business with its own proper process, and not in any way just a bunch of luvvies with their feet on their desks dreaming up wacky ideas.
• Anticipating suggests that marketing is a forward-looking activity, not one that's only concerned with the present (or, heaven forbid, the past).
• Requirements sounds like a term chosen to blur over the trickiest issue in the definition (to which we'll return later), about whether marketing in financial services should concern itself with consumers' needs, or wants, or both. (Unlike many other categories, consumers may not much want our products but they may need them, or even in a few cases be required by law to have them.)
• And Profitably is added at the end for much the same reason as ‘process’, to emphasize that marketing is a serious, financially responsible part of a business and not simply a cunning plan to spend millions of pounds of the company's money sponsoring golf tournaments and rugby matches that everyone in the marketing department can attend on expenses.

But while speculation like this may be fun, it's not very helpful. True, the form of words does have a whiff of the committee-room about it, but as one-sentence definitions go, it really isn't bad.

We put it to the test in two of the pieces of original research that have gone into this book. We exposed it in the four focus groups that we conducted among senior financial services marketing people who are members of the Financial Services Forum, a membership organisation for senior executives to help improve marketing effectiveness on the basis good marketing is good for consumers. And we also took it into the half-day workshop that we held for two dozen of the best and brightest younger financial marketers, all aged under 30.

All took it as a challenge, looking as hard as they could for ways they could find it lacking. But the truth is that it came through this process of challenge remarkably unscathed, not greatly admired but remarkably difficult to improve on. (It was only later, when we moved on from the high-level definition, that the uncertainties and disagreements that lay below the surface became apparent.)

Inevitably several respondents made attempts to improve on the CIM's form of words. One particularly critical respondent in one of our focus groups, for example, claimed that the great management guru Philip Kotler had said much the same thing, but far better and more memorably. We looked up Kotler's quote afterwards, and in fact he said that marketing is:

… the science and art of exploring, creating, and delivering value to satisfy the needs of a target market at a profit. Marketing identifies unfulfilled needs and desires. It defines, measures and quantifies the size of the identified market and the profit potential. It pinpoints which segments the company is capable of serving best and it designs and promotes the appropriate products and services.

Actually, we think the Chartered Institute put it better than the great guru.

Two or three respondents found the CIM's definition old-fashioned and out of date. Some thought it was wrong to imply that marketing is something that's done by companies to consumers– as one put it, ‘rather than with them, or indeed them doing things to us’. Another made a similar point, saying: ‘There is a sense that today it’s much less about simply telling people, it's about them hearing and then crucially responding to us'.

This idea of marketing as a partnership between firms and their customers has been widely adopted across the industry in recent years, and in some firms has led to some important changes in marketing processes. One of these is the widespread adoption of co-creation, an approach that actively involves customers in development processes rather than tackling all the origination behind closed doors and then testing the output on customers in market research studies.

Others thought that especially in a service-sector business like financial services, but actually in FMCG businesses too, it is important to recognise the importance of building and developing relationships. They found the CIM's definition too narrow, one saying: ‘This is a very transactional statement, and I don’t think we work in a transactional business – it's not about the transaction, it's about the relationship'.

Another made a similar point, saying: ‘I think there’s a big gap here, and it's to do with the empowered consumer. The notion of the need for a mutually satisfying relationship is not there. And that's something which, increasingly, certainly in the space my business inhabits, is becoming really, really important'.

That said, though, not all our respondents agreed on the importance of relationships. Some (including your authors) approach this subject cautiously. Do customers actually want relationships, or indeed partnerships, with their financial services providers? Might it not be the case that for many people, and for many of their financial needs, what they really want is a brilliantly well-executed transactional service at the moment that they need it?

Faced with the CIM's definition, one radical went a good deal further, challenging the whole concept of a marketing ‘function’ or ‘department’. He said:

If you take the view that marketing is at the heart of a customer-led organisation, then it should spread through the whole of that organisation. I think that raises a big question about whether there's any need for marketing departments at all – marketing is almost a Diaspora throughout my organisation, so that those who are closest to our customers, in our branches, are the ones who do what it says in your definition, figuring out what the customer requires and how we can profitably fulfil it.

This line of thought created unease among some respondents who enjoy running marketing departments, and it does raise some practical issues. Who is ultimately responsible if something goes wrong? Who should control the budget? Who audits the success (or failure) of the activities?

Meanwhile, in the under-30s workshop, it was a different aspect of the CIM definition that ruffled feathers. There was widespread and serious discomfort with the use of the word process. To many of our young participants, this word sounded much too rigid and industrial. Marketing, in their view, should be something much looser, more spontaneous, more creative, just … funkier. Your authors were a bit sniffy about this, until it occurred to us that maybe our sniffiness meant that we were getting old.

Still, all of that said, given how much everyone in the research would have liked to have improved on the Institute's definition, it held up remarkably well. As one respondent summarised: ‘At a high level you just look at it and say, you know, from 10,000 feet it makes a lot of sense. I guess it’s missing some of the detail, but then you wind up turning it into a paragraph. Which isn't what it's meant to be'.

It was only when we began our descent from 10,000 feet and looked at the next level of detail that the picture became more complicated.

In our research, we used the best known of mnemonics to explore the main business areas that could be said to fall within the remit of marketing. This mnemonic began in the field of FMCG marketing as the ‘Four Ps’: Product, Price, Place and Promotion. Then, when taken from the original FMCG context and applied to the service sector, the list grew from four to seven Ps, with the addition of People, Process, and the slightly awkward Physical Evidence.

To be clear about what we meant by these terms:

The central issue is, of course, the extent to which marketers own, or should own, the responsibility for each of these areas.

In our research, opinion among marketers was extremely divided. In fact, more than divided, it was fragmented. A small number of hard-liners claimed responsibility for the whole lot; at the opposite extreme, a similar number believed that only one of the seven, promotion, should fall within the remit of marketing. Most others occupied positions on a spectrum in between.

Amid this uncertainty, it became apparent that many of our respondents weren't at all sure of their own views. Some who began by adopting a hard-line position, laying claim to all seven areas, steadily rowed back throughout their focus group until by the end they were focusing entirely on advertising campaigns and other promotional activity.

In doing so, it seemed to us that they were reflecting a widespread tendency among marketers to believe in principle in the need for a broad remit across the seven Ps but to default, in unguarded moments, to a focus on just one, promotion. For example, your authors recently attended a conference for senior financial services marketing people. Among the speakers' biographies (usually written by the speakers themselves), one described a ‘strategic marketer with over 15 years of experience in the full marketing mix including PR, advertising, sponsorship and digital’. Another described a speaker as ‘responsible for all aspects of marketing including campaigns, brand management and promotion, sponsorship, advertising, digital marketing and events’. These lists are far from ‘the full marketing mix’, or ‘all aspects of marketing’ – they're just lists of promotional activities.

We thought it was important to explore this dichotomy in more depth, so we offered our focus group respondents three options in each of the seven areas. We asked them to make a choice between:

1. taking the lead
2. having an influence
3. leaving it to others.

And we also asked them to contrast theory and practice, by distinguishing between what they thought should ideally happen and what actually happens in their own organisation.

Overall, the large majority of respondents told us that they believed they should have more control or influence in theory than was currently the case. For some the gap was enormous: in theory they believed they should take the lead in all seven areas, but in practice they had little or no say over any of them except promotion.

The enormously wide variation in the scope of marketing is clear from the following verbatim comments. Here is a selection of respondents' comments, showing the breadth of opinion on this crucial issue:

‘I think the day of the marketing department that sat there and just generated some big fantastic ad campaign and then went and smoked a cigar are long gone. Most marketers I know are deeply involved in everything that touches the customer, and shaping the pipeline of propositions – everything that's coming through the organisation’.

‘My challenge in financial services is that the cake is often half-baked by the time it arrives with me and my department. In our organisation, most people believe that marketing departments are much more about communications, lead generation’.

‘Basically, I think your job as a marketing director is to get every customer to put you on a shortlist against your competitors. We marketers create the shortlist, and then it's down to a whole bunch of other things that happen’.

‘Marketing is absolutely more than communications to me. It's everything, from the beginning of talking to customers through to making sure they're happy. Communication comes towards the end of that long process’.

‘It's important to give marketers permission to do more, but also marketers have to realise that they should do more than just doing the ads’.

‘Aligning the organisation around customer needs, and satisfying both stated and unstated needs, and all that stuff – that's my role as marketing director’.

‘Really, marketing is there to warm our prospects up, to get us on their shortlist’.

‘The company sort of does its thing, and then it's our job to present it to the consumer’.

‘Marketing supports your business purpose, and that's its function. I think marketing often gets too big for its boots’.

‘I haven't had the difficulty of trying to change the business, we had a very strong purpose and very strong values. My job is to tell the story’.

‘I don't think anyone round this table would say marketing is just communication – the influence we need to have is on the products we provide, the service, the experience’.

Of course this fundamental uncertainty about the remit of marketing, and the conflict between those who believe it's basically about doing the ads and those who believe it's about everything that touches the customer, is far from new, and the debate rages on far beyond the world of financial services. The American Marketing Association, for example, supports the broad definition, stating:

Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.

On the other hand, a commentator from a US media company follows the line taken by many marketing services agencies, saying simply:

Marketing is the art and science of persuasive communication.

But while we're not surprised to see this age-old schism still running down the middle of today's financial services industry, it does seem strange and unhelpful. As we wrote a few pages back, it's hard to think of any other corporate function where a similar uncertainty exists. And big-picture marketers, looking ideally for control and at least for influence across all seven of the seven Ps, must be dismayed to see so many of their colleagues happily reinforcing the colouring-in department stereotype.

The split in self-perception was so significant that we thought we should explore it further. So we included the same questions – on the role of marketing in theory, and the role of marketing in individuals' own organisations – in the quantitative research we carried out among Financial Services Forum members. The key findings are shown in the tables, the first showing what our respondents thought should ideally happen.

Marketers Should Ideally:

Note the extremely low scores in the third column: with the single exception of price, virtually no-one thought that marketers should leave any of these areas to others (and even in the case of price, only 13% were happy to do so).

In the second table, respondents told us what happens currently in their own organisations.

In My Organisation, Marketers Currently:

The contrast between the figures in the two tables is clear. In respondents' current organisations, the proportion of marketers taking control is far lower. And while the proportion claiming to have an influence isn't dramatically different, the proportion saying they leave the different areas to others is much higher. (At least, in six out of the seven areas it is: the exception is, inevitably, promotion, which only 3% of respondents claim to ‘leave to others’. Mind you, even at that very low level, it's an odd figure. Who are these senior marketers who leave promotion to others? And who the hell are the ‘others’?)

Finally, in this third table, to get a more accurate fix on the gap between theory and practice, we compare the mean scores given for all seven dimensions. The table shows scores on a scale of 1 to 3, so, for example, in the ‘ideal’ column a mean score of 1 would mean that all respondents think that marketers should ideally take complete control, while a mean score of 3 would mean that all respondents think they should ideally leave control of the area to others.

The Seven Ps

The middle column in this table tells us that respondents think marketers should have a very high level of control over promotion, and then, in order, slightly lower levels of control over physical evidence, place, process, people, product and finally price. However, in their organisations currently, the right-hand column tells us that they have lower levels of control over all seven areas. Promotion sill scores highest, but at 1.30 against an ideal 1.07, and of the other six areas, only physical evidence scores under the average of 2. There must clearly be a lot of frustrated marketers out there.

This despite the fact that the findings in the middle column actually demonstrate a fairly modest level of aspiration. While respondents certainly think they should ideally have more control, they don't by any means think they should have complete control. Quotes from our focus groups reflect this attitude, and give some clues to the reasoning behind it. For example, a head of marketing in asset management says:

Product has to come first, you know, you have to be investment-led. You have to think about the return you're going to deliver, how are you going to monitor its risk. There's someone there analysing the risk, so they're really building the product – it's a complex thing.

Such modesty may be endearing, but it doesn't reflect any great confidence in the role of marketing and we don't think you would find it often among the marketing leaders of, say, automotive or IT companies. Acting within the business as the representative of the customer, marketing directors in car companies may sometimes cause friction by asking their engineering colleagues for the impossible – but that doesn't stop them asking. And very often, their customer-based insights are prioritised over the engineers' passions and priorities in the finished product. One of your authors remembers launching a car with advertising which had nothing at all to say about its radical and innovative new suspension system, the engineers' pride and joy, but gave great prominence to its new double cup-holder, which the engineers thought trivial and dull. The marketers were right, though – the target market loved those cup-holders.

Another respondent with a senior marketing role in insurance says: ‘Challenging the organization [on behalf of the customer] is the bit which is always an issue—marketing in financial services not really having the standing to challenge is the problem’. Another, running a young and small digital business, says: ‘Over the years, one thing I’ve noticed is that everyone thinks they're a marketer, and everyone likes to fiddle without any particular structure – particularly in financial services, where marketing's beginning to mature now but has a long history of amateurishness'.

And a third, in charge of marketing at a large health insurance company, nails the key point about the experience of marketers to date when he points out: ‘Let’s face it, there are plenty of organisations in our industry that aren't marketing-led but that are number-one and number-two players in their sector'. It seems to us that everything we have reported on this key issue stems from this one crucial point. So far, on the whole, excellence in marketing has not been fundamental to the commercial success of most financial services businesses. Marketers have usually occupied a second-order role, doing useful work producing brochures and sales aids, and in some firms having fun spending big money on advertising and sponsorship campaigns. But the performance of their firms has depended much more on other factors. All too often, marketers at best have occupied a seat toward the bottom end of the table – and sometimes not even that. In medieval times salt was expensive, and thus served only to those of high rank at the head of the table. Those at the lower end of the table weren't allowed access to the salt, and hence the expression ‘below the salt’ – the place we think is occupied by many financial marketers.

If that were to remain as true in the future as it has been in the past, financial services marketing wouldn't be a very interesting place to be, and this wouldn't be a very interesting book. That's why it's important – not least for your authors – to consider whether there are reasons why this second-order status quo is really starting to change.

Before we move on to look for those reasons in the next chapter, let's return to those terms we used in our three-point scale – control, influence and leave to others – and take a view on the place that financial services marketers should rightfully occupy. If the current status of marketing is too low, how much higher should we be aiming?

Frankly, for ourselves, in five of the seven areas, we're not hung up on the distinction between controlling and influencing. It seems clear to us that control over two – Promotion and Physical Evidence – must belong in marketing. These are marketers' core competences, and they simply must have the skills to control these areas better than anyone else. But it's equally clear that the other five areas are all likely to call for some kind of partnerships with other functions. Risk, compliance, IT, HR, operations, legal, facilities, and pretty much everyone else all have a role to play somewhere along the line. If control means being able to call a halt or enforce a change when you identify a show-stopper, then control will often belong to someone outside the marketing function. In today's heavily regulated and risk-averse financial world, it's simply not possible for a marketer to override a non-negotiable demand from Risk, Compliance or Legal.

But above and beyond having influence in the five areas not under marketing's control, it seems to us that there's a bigger requirement, to do with setting the overall direction and strategy of anything the business is doing which impacts the customer. If the business aims to be – or become – customer-centric, then it seems to us that by definition it has to be – or become – marketing-centric.

Marketers' fundamental role is to represent the customer within the organisation. To be able to do that, it's imperative that they have a seat at all seven of our tables, and, what's more, a seat above the salt. And while it's neither necessary nor realistic that they should be in charge of every meeting, it is necessary that their voice is always heard.