Last week I reported on the expected increase in social media spend from an already high 7.4% of marketing budgets to 10.4% within a year and 19.5% within five years. It is therefore both interesting and somewhat disturbing that we continue to see a sizable fissure between what companies are doing with social media and what they are doing with the rest of their strategies. I asked CMOs to rate “How effectively is social media integrated with your firm’s marketing strategy” on a seven point scale where 7 is “very integrated” and 1 is “not at all integrated.” Results from The CMO Survey indicate an average score of 3.8 with a standard deviation of 2.0. Sadly, only 7 percent of respondents believe that social media is “very integrated” to the firm’s strategy while 18.4% rated social media as “not at all integrated.” The full distribution of responses is shown in Figure 1.
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The CMO Survey Blog
Outsourcing Marketing
I asked top marketers to report how much they expected their companies to outsource marketing in the next 12 months. This percentage has grown over time as shown in Figure 1. In fact the last measurement, taken in August 2011, grew by over 100% over the prior year! (more…)
The Lure of Disintermediation
Disintermediation refers to companies going directly to customers with products and services. No channel partners are used to move offerings or to manage interactions with customers. The CMO Survey has asked managers to report whether their companies will increase their level of disintermediation in the next 12 months. The percentage responding “yes” has increased over the last three years as shown in the figure. In fact, there has been an increase of over 100% between August 2009 and August 2011! Because internet sales and the use of social media have also soared during this period, I think it is a good bet that disintermediation does not mean bricks and mortar for most companies. (more…)
Why Have a Marketing Function if Your Company is Market-Oriented?
As marketing gains increasing prominence as an orientation that everyone in the organization shares and as a process that all functions participate in deploying, a critical issue that arises is the role of the marketing function. Jerry Wind (1996) says it well when he notes, “Marketing, as a management function, appears to be in decline. Marketing as a management philosophy and orientation, espoused and practiced throughout the corporation, is however seen increasingly as critical to the success of any organization.” (more…)
How to Invent a Marketing Function
Studying organizations over the years, I have found that new marketing leaders often join companies that have only the beginnings of a marketing function. Facing such a situation, how do you invent a marketing function? What are the key steps? What capabilities help marketing deliver what it can offer companies? (more…)
The Marketing Ivory Tower Needs to Get a Grip
In the August 2010 CMO Survey, I asked top marketers the following question: What is marketing primarily responsible for in your firm?
Marketers were then asked to check from a list of strategic, tactical, and financial activities in firms. What I found is in the table below.
At least a couple worrisome thoughts arise from these results. First, while marketing is playing an important role in brand and social media in most organizations, marketing’s contributions to the key strategic activities of the firm are sadly absent. This includes marketing’s weak contributions to key strategic activities such as market entry, innovation, CRM, sales, distribution, and targeting.
Ask any top business school marketing professor what marketers do and they will likely respond with something like the 4Ps (price, promotion, place-distribution, and product) and the 3Cs (customers, competitors, and company). This leads to the second worrisome thought. I think it is pretty clear that marketing is NOT doing what ivory tower marketers think it is doing or would like it to do. This little fantasy that marketing does important things contributes to a problem among many marketing academics, which is that they don’t contribute to building knowledge about successful marketing.
What’s happening in companies that keeps marketing professionals from making the contributions we train them to believe they should be making? Or is the problem that academic marketing research and training need to change to increase the value of marketing to companies? If not us, who?
What is Marketing Responsible for in your Firm? (n = 332 responses)
| Activity | Number of people checking | Percentage of total |
| Positioning | 261 | 78.6% |
| Promotion | 256 | 77.1% |
| Brand | 255 | 76.8% |
| Marketing research | 240 | 72.3% |
| Social media | 231 | 69.6% |
| Competitive intelligence | 208 | 62.7% |
| Public relations | 193 | 58.1% |
| Lead generation | 192 | 57.8% |
| Market entry strategies | 190 | 57.2% |
| New products | 170 | 51.2% |
| Customer relationship management | 147 | 44.3% |
| Targeting/market selection | 136 | 41% |
| Sales | 123 | 37% |
| Pricing | 119 | 35.8% |
| Innovation | 111 | 33.4% |
| Customer service | 83 | 25% |
| Stock market performance | 4 | 1.2% |
| Distribution | 0 | 0% |
