2 Marketing Management
I was doing a consulting job with IBM in Canada and realized that the advertising people did not confer with the sales team and none of them talked to the sales promotion people. I ran into the same situation with AT&T. The advertising people worked by themselves and although I tried to get all members of marketing working together, it didn’t work. I consequently resigned from the consulting position.
To be effective in marketing, all members of the six marketing departments must talk together and plan together. Those six departments are:
1. Sales
2. Marketing communications
3. Customer service
4. Product or service development
5. Internet
6. Research
Without working together, how can you determine which marketing tool is best against a particular member of the buying decision in a particular market? Although people are exposed to various media, you want to start with the ones they use the most. If you are going after young people, you probably will concentrate on the Internet and smartphones; for executives, maybe newspapers or business magazines; and for mom, sales promotion might work best.
In my experience, the best organizational setup is a vice president of marketing, a single individual with responsibility for and authority over all marketing activities, including sales. Notice that I didn’t say “vice president of sales and marketing.” Companies that have a vice president of sales and marketing usually treat sales as a separate entity. This leads to the situation where the sales team tells one story about the product or service and the rest of marketing tells another. That’s not effective communications. Each person with common characteristics who is involved in the buying decision should receive the same message, whether it is from a newspaper ad, television commercial, website, or sales presentation. That way all messages reinforce each other. That is why you need a creative strategy, which is discussed in Chapter 9, The Advertising Plan. The creative strategy states the message and it should be used by all members of marketing.
Now, some companies that are effective in marketing, like Procter & Gamble, use the title “brand manager” rather than “vice president of marketing.” The brand manager is responsible for the profit on the brand, but only has the authority on market communications, consisting of advertising, sales promotion, and public relations. That means through sheer personality and persuasion, she has to coordinate all the other marketing activities, such as sales, research, customer service, product/service plan, and the Internet. I was invited to lecture at one marketing class at Duke University graduate school of business and after talking for a while and answering questions, I mentioned that probably none of them would be hired as a brand manager at Procter & Gamble. The whole class looked puzzled and I thought the class professor was going to have a heart attack. I explained by telling them that P&G does not normally hire individuals that have a marketing degree because they want to teach them marketing themselves and they only select those that have the personality to make the system work. That is why brand management works at P&G and usually fails at other companies.
Having the Right Advertising Agency
Adverting agencies can make or break your promotional efforts. Too often, I don’t remember the name of the company or brand five minutes later. Too often I don’t understand an ad, and I find that too many are trying too hard to be funny, whether or not the brand lends itself to humor. What you, as a marketing manager, want is an agency that is run by a person with account management experience. That way you have a better chance of having soundness in their work. I have worked for agencies that were led by a creative person and sometimes they do good work. But let me give you an example of what can happen.
We were showing a television commercial to a client. I was an account executive and had previously told my boss that I thought it was off target. After we showed the commercial to the client, the client asked me what I thought about it. Before I could answer, my boss spoke up and said he thought it was very effective. The client than turned to me again and asked my thoughts. I said it was poor creative. The client agreed, got up, and walked out. After he left my boss told me I had just cost the agency $50,000, which was the cost of the filming, and that I was fired. We were stationed in Atlanta and the home office of the agency was in New York City. I flew up in the morning and went to see the CEO of the agency to explain the situation. Luckily he agreed with me, I was rehired and my boss was fired. The problem with this type of scenario is twofold: first, in a creative-dominated agency there is not usually someone as dumb as I to stick up for the client and second, the agency’s CEO might not be as clear-sighted as this one was.
In an agency that is managed by a person with account management experience, individual account executives usually have the authority to reject creative material done by the creative department. The account executive is the prime contact with the client, is familiar with the client’s business, and helps the client write the marketing plan. The creative department consists of copywriters and art directors who develop the creative upon direction from the account executive. In a creative-dominated agency, the account executive usually cannot reject creative material before it is shown to the client. That can lead to the goofy commercials that don’t sell anything. Therefore, you want an advertising agency in which the account executive can reject creative before it is shown to you.
You also want an account executive who can help you write your marketing plan. When I was an account executive, the first client assigned to me was P&G. As I mentioned before, P&G has their own way of doing things and it took me five attempts before they approved of the plan I wrote. Needless to say, I learned a lot in a short period of time. A good account executive knows more about writing the plan than anyone at the company. I always wrote the plan on my accounts, including the introduction of Fresca and Canada Dry.
You also want to check out the media department of an advertising agency. Usually when individuals join an agency they are put in the media department and if they do well, are promoted to the account group or some other department. You do not want these inexperienced people handling your media buys. If they assign you an experienced pro, then fine. If not, you should check out the media buying service companies, where the employees have been making media decisions for years.
In closing this chapter I want to repeat the hockey analogy I used in the previous edition of this book. You should buy a hockey stick for everyone involved in marketing, including your advertising agency and media buying group if you have one. The puck is your brand, the ice is the market, and the opposing team is your competition. Your objective is to get your puck into the opponent’s net. You keep passing the puck back and forth, from sales, to advertising, to sales promotion, to the outside agency, to customer service, working your way down the ice. If one player gets in trouble, he passes the puck to another, back and forth, until it finally goes into the net.
Appendix B contains a comprehensive outline of your relationship with an advertising agency.