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About Me
Alex - Alexandros Poulos is Covisio's Managing Director and co-founder. He enjoys technology marketing, innovative thinking, and living by the sea.
Alex is the main contributor of the On the Scene marketing blog.
Learn more about me here.
Marketing in Crisis
When I initially decided to work in marketing (coming from R&D technology management), the first words our VP of Marketing told me were: “That’s great news! Only you do understand that you just lost 50% of your brainpower simply by joining the marketing team!” Really? In marketing? With all this left-brain / right-brain activity you do here?
I hate to say he made a good point. Marketing is definitely not what is meant (and paid for) to be. You see that in every industry sector and especially in technology.
Consider the following points.
- Marketing is the first division to downsize when things are getting tough and a company is looking to stick to its vital functions. On the other hand, everyone is turning to marketing to generate buzz and cheer when things are going well. What’s really the message here?
- Marketing is less and less a factor for innovation and new product development. Product strategy in technology companies is mostly driven by the R&D department and new technology products are shaped to map to customer requirements by the sales teams directly in the field.
- Marketing is considered more of a “necessary-evil” intermediary between R&D and sales. According to engineers, marketers do not understand technology and according to salesmen, marketers do not really share the pain of having to close deals and meet quota numbers.
- Marketing’s performance at the corporate strategic level is rarely defined, quantified, understood or rewarded. Marketing executives are now under more pressure than ever from CEOs and Boards to increase marketing budget’s ROI. But how can they improve it if they don’t even measure it? There’s no surprise then that, according to recent research, the average tenure of a CMO today is just above 2 years (and actually less in tech companies), the lowest for any C-level executive.
- New marketing technologies (including but not limited to mobile advertising, search engine optimization, webcasts, blogs, social networking and others) are spreading fast and, when applied rigorously, can have a real impact on technology marketing goals. Very few CMOs are on top of these new technologies and therefore fail to apply them to their firms’ benefit leaving tremendous opportunities to potential competitors and new entrants.
Why is that? Is everyone missing the point what the value of marketing is? Or does marketing bring that upon itself? And if so, how can we fix it?
Northwestern University’s Prof. Don Schultz wrote a powerful article in Marketing News back in 2001 identifying the need to change marketing as we know it. He suggested to focus on value creation and management instead of what is today known as marketing. He was right. Marketing needs to change. Change role. Change scope. Change expertise. Change faces. Change mindset.