| Marketing is not only about advertising. My experience
tells me that marketing is best accomplished when it
is approached as multidisciplinary business activity.
Quality was once thought of as a specific corporate
function. That all changed in the 1980s, when total
quality management programs in Japan taught American
companies the benefits of having all employees engaged
in the process of product quality, feedback from customers
and continued incremental improvement. Marketing is
rapidly becoming a technology and many marketing people
still see it as an art. Customer relationship management
(CRM) was designed and developed by software engineers,
not marketing consultants or ad agencies. Distribution,
once a department of most marketing organizations, is
now logistics. Logistics is a network of services coordinated
by software programs with the idea of efficient delivery
of goods and services to the customer's doorstep.
Most businesses could not efficiently run any part of
their business today without computers, software and
high speed networks. Coordinating resources, inventories
and moving products from the click of a mouse to production
and doorstep delivery, when done efficiently with all
the proper notifications to the customer, is also good
marketing.
I think marketing, as a function, has lost much of
its position and power because the responsibility for
many of the marketing functions is already dispersed
throughout the enterprise. The chief information officer
(CIO) and information professionals keep the communications
networks and customer access channels up and running
24/7/365. In many organizations, the vice president
of business development reports directly to the chief
executive officer (CEO), as does the vice president
of logistics.
While doing research on my book, Total Access, I spoke
with quite a few executives running operations, logistics,
IT and business development. None claimed a marketing
title but all used terms such as "customer care",
"brand building", "customer life cycle", and "service". I like this trend! It makes
businesses more customer-friendly and more successful.
And in the last analysis, the CEO is the chief marketing
officer because he or she is the only one with the power
and responsibility to coordinate all the resources within
an enterprise to make big changes happen.
Q : You've also written
that the CIO is taking over more of marketing as technology
becomes so central to a company's performance.
McKenna : I think the CIO
is doing much of the marketing already. The CIO is the
one who has to manage the nerve centre of the marketing
enterprise. More than half of all marketing today in
industries such as retail, financial services, travel
and on-demand entertainment is done by software and
network systems. Think about it. Research, datamining,
customer life-cycle management, segmentation, self-service,
market simulation, sales lead management, key word and
embedded ads and CRM are all new high tech tools for
better marketing effectiveness. The CIO and information
professionals are the people who make sure that all
those information resources are current and available
on demand.
And with increasing identity thefts, illegal computer
access and fraud, the CIO's responsibility for assuring
customer privacy is yet another way of providing customer
care satisfaction.
Reproduced with permission of the publisher John Wiley
& Sons, Ltd., from Conversations with Marketing
Masters. Copyright C 2007 by Laura Mazur and Louella
Miles.
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