The Business of Marketing is Business

The Business of Marketing is Business

Marketing calls on a wide range of skills: Creativity, originality, artistic vision, psychology, analytic ability, salesmanship, political savvy, trend-spotting, heuristics.

In fact, the Marketing team can include narrowly focused subject matter experts in any or all of these fields.

But it’s vitally important for the Marketing executive to remember one simple truth: The Business of Marketing is Business.

If you get swept away in the process – no matter how brilliant – you are lost.

Taking the Marketing By Objectives approach espoused here is the surest way to guarantee keeping your eye on the prize.

It also helps to stave off analysis by paralysis. Consider:

• -        For most businesses, the most important goal by far is the bottom line.
• -       Marketing’s impact on the bottom line most frequently occurs at arm’s length – or further.
• -       Quantifying this impact can then become an exercise in inference – not the type of discussion you want to have very often.

Fortunately, corporate leadership has already broken this task down for you. Key resources such as the corporate report, 10K and 10Q filings and other official guidance provide Marketing with an unerring compass with which to chart a goal-oriented course that will deliver to the bottom line.

So by all means, build a team with all of the complementary specialties needed to devise and implement brilliant Marketing programs. Reward their efforts. Foster collegiality.

But at the end of the day, to be relevant to corporate leadership, measure your results against truly relevant goals.

Deliver the Business.