Marketing Genius

TRACK 2 EXPECTATIONS
Creating tomorrow while delivering today
‘The rise of an information age doesn’t mean we stop producing or selling. We still need products and services. But it does mean that the business and marketing strategies that made sellers’ brands powerful yesterday won’t necessarily keep them tomorrow. If it’s not a win-win for both sides, one side or the other will see no reason to pursue the relationship.’

Alan Mitchell

‘The web enables total transparency. People with access to relevant information are beginning to challenge any type of authority. The stupid, loyal and humble customer, employee, patient or citizen is dead.’

Kjell Nordström and Jonas Ridderstråle

Markets increasingly drive the business, yet marketers are not in the driving seat. Marketing is still too often seen as a peripheral function, a specialist community, a drain on expenditure, a support to the sales team.

Marketing is much more than this: a process for the whole business, although it may require some specialist practitioners too. It drives demand in the short and long term. It fuels profits, today and tomorrow. It creates the future and delivers today, driving sales and delivery of the customer experiences, while also developing the new markets and products, and builds the brands and relationships to ensure success in them. It also typically delivers a better return on investment than any other part of business.

It is time for marketers to move from the fringes to the centre of decision-making, harnessing the momentum of market change, and the authority of the customer, to shape strategies and business priorities from the outside in, rather than inside out.

Business has been led for too long from the inside out. Accountants and operational managers have sought to improve what has always been done, rather than respond to and exploit the best opportunities in the market. The danger, of course, with incrementalism is that it can lead to irrelevance, rather than addressing the real opportunities of markets.

However, marketers must change if they want to take centre stage, and indeed if they want to survive.

The biggest opportunities in business today lie not in improving the efficiency of what you have already done, but by embracing change in the outside world. This is primarily a marketing challenge.

Businesses need marketers now more than ever.

Marketers must form the response to this change: to see the new game either being played or emerging, break out of the conventions that were designed for a previous century, exceed expectations on the high street and stock markets, and create exceptional value for customers and for shareholders, and in new ways.

Today the expectations are incredibly high on all sides:
• Customers want more than a product or service. They used to tolerate stock-outs and be happy to come back again next week, or delivery times in weeks and months, and accept that in a mainstream store there would be no negotiation, and they would expect to pay the full price. Their experiences of Amazon to Wal-Mart have changed that. They now expect the best quality products, confidence that their expectations will always be met, personalized solutions to meet their wider needs, same-day delivery, and lowest prices.
• Employees want more than a job that pays a salary. They used to tolerate menial tasks, in a sterile environment, where their role would not change over time, and as long as they got paid they did not care about the wider organization or its customers and shareholders. They now expect a more fulfilling role, a better environment and benefits beyond payment, they expect to learn and progress, care passionately about their customers; they want to influence their organization, and be proud of it.
• Shareholders want more than a return on investment. They used to tolerate ups and downs in share prices, lack of short-term profits in order to invest in future, no dividend payments some years, annual updates at the AGM. Their experiences of dotcoms and hedge funds have changed that. They expect regular and transparent information, more influence and power, constant growth in quarterly profits, regular dividends and the best returns across sector, not just among peers.
Stakeholders, more broadly, have gone from being of minor importance, through important from the perspective of compliance, to being partners in creating superior value for shareholders. This might include:
• Access to socially responsible investor capital.
• Attracting and retaining the best talent.
• Building brand loyalty and reputation with customers.
• Accessing strategic resources and capabilities through partners.
• Improved employee relations and conflict resolution with unions.
• Increased efficiency and collaboration across the value chain.
• Greater influence, favourability and flexibility with regulators.
• Mutual support and accommodation in local communities.

• Shareholders want more than a return on investment.

• Employees want more than a job that pays a salary.