Where have all the marketing directors gone?

Is it my imagination, or have most Marketing Directors become Marketing Coordinators?

Marketing Directors seem to spend all their time in endless meetings with a range of new media and other specialists discussing ROI on a broad range consumer oriented activities. Almost everything I read in the various media written by a ‘Marketing Director’ revolves around the broad array of specialist suppliers they have hired to ‘deliver more cost efficient market impact’.

Bizarrely they also seem to delight in ‘competing’ with their own suppliers, in an attempt to get lower costs and achieve greater speed of delivery. So they have set up in-house facilities for social media, e-commerce, data analytics, design, and so on.

The net impact of all this activity is that the focus of the Marketing Director’s job seems to have become coordination. Ensuring that one set of specialists work hand in hand with another set of specialists.

Bouncing from one meeting to the next, and each time focusing on the minutae of the activity, and the results criteria.

Because they now have hired a few specialists and feel ‘hands on’, they also pontificate about transformation and specialisation, and how their suppliers haven’t kept up with the demands of marketers.

This is their view of the ‘big picture’. It’s all very much driven by speed and cost of implementation.

However it seems to me that although the tools for interaction with customers have become ever more effective, many Marketing Directors still employs them for messaging rather than partnering. They have failed to establish a process to take on board customer conversations and bring this valuable feedback to the heart of their Company ethos.

They aren’t using all these new specialist skills to help transform corporate strategy. In essence they are using new media for old media purposes.

The other thing I haven’t heard many Marketing Directors talk about for ages is managing brand character and brand values.

Do they care about the brand anymore? Do each of these specialists they are hiring actually understand the brand and its values?

Have the people who are dealing directly with customers been trained to uphold the values and character of the brand… especially those who actually represent the brand on social media?

My experience with the various new media specialists is that they are very competent in their area of of expertise, but apply their skills in exactly the same way regardless of the brand they are working on.

So I urge Marketing Directors to get ‘big picture’ again. Stop acting like coordinators and start transforming your own business and brand. Step back from the implementation and focus on how to use new specialist tools to create a whole new way for your company to operate with customers as the starting point.

Alan Fairnington, Managing Partner, Duxton Consulting