Marketing in the Boardroom

So I’ve prepared a model which attempts to summarize the major points I’ve learned so far in marketing. It has been developed with the intention of being able to expand it as the course continues (ie: the 4 P’s of Product, Price, Place and Promotion) but  in order for me to organize my thoughts, it’s important for me to get something down on paper. It’s also a great opportunity for me to play with a new software package I’m trialling. If you’ve been looking for something that allows you to draw quick conceptual maps then checkout Mindjet MindManager. Thanks to the Devil’s Inquisitor for pointing me in the right direction and if you’re interested in sustainability, check out his blog ‘The future we face rests on the choices you make.’

So looking at this process, there’s another insight that’s been bubbling away for me since I started looking at the value creation process. Namely that marketing isn’t a business unit, at least, not in the way that manufacturing or HR or accounting is. There’s an execution component, sure, activities that needs to be done by marketing professionals like setting up the advertising campaign or understanding the customer and explaining that to the rest of the organization but the more I look at it, the more critical it seems for C-level executives and members of the board to have not only an understanding but a marketing orientation.

It’s a bit like organizational culture; an organization where the CEO yells at people gives implicit permission to the rest of the company that it’s acceptable to do the same thing. In the same way, if you don’t have at least a member of your board with an understanding and willingness to promote marketing within the organization then you’re going to miss out on diversity, insight and perspective. That’s not unique to marketing, and holds true across a board for a number of specialties, but I’ve observed that this is acknowledged far more readily for technical professions or legal or finance than for marketing and that’s the sort of unrecognized bias that keeps a company from reaching its full potential.

In terms of business as a whole, selling has been a critical component since the market came into existence, but selling isn’t marketing. I’d argue that sales is a business unit, like the others listed above (HR, accounting etc.) but where marketing differentiates itself is that it is cross functional. It’s job is to share the mantra of the company, to align the different organizational silos so that everyone understands how they contribute and impact the customer. From this perspective, it’s just as important to market internally as externally, to use the marketing team to help the manufacturing group understand what our customers want via market research or to help the HR team understand the drivers of company culture to assist them to recruit people that are the right fit.

Going back a couple of posts, I talked about customer orientation vs. product orientation: where the product is determined by the customer needs rather than creating the product first and then finding a market to sell it into. It’s the marketing team that is driven to understand the customer and share that insight with the rest of the organization. This intrinsically links marketing with vision and strategic direction and that’s without bringing in the ongoing tasks of product line extension and mix, branding or customer relations.

Post-MBA I’m intending to move to the boardroom, to use the skillsets I have to work as a non-executive director. Taking on the Masters of Marketing has given me a whole new insight into the diversity that needs to be present at board level for the management of risk and the optimization of vision but also how marketing is used internally as another channel for creation of culture and dissemination of information. Having a background in business, but no previous experience in marketing, the value generated from doing a compressed course in Marketing has helped me far more than continued technical specialization would.