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Being honest about what marketers achieve
I was at a conference recently where yet again marketers
presented intentions as facts. What is it about marketers, that they believe anyone
is fooled by this? Why have marketers erected this enormous sand-founded castle
of so-called best practice in marketing, which so often only serves to find them
their next job?
Why do they continue to try
to dupe their seniors into believing that they have created the ultimate in customer
centricity, when their figures show how little their customers care for them?
Again and again customers
tell big companies that they are going off track,
often giving them years of warning, rather than
the months that it takes to turn the marketing
tanker. Again and again, the captains of marketing
produce evidence that customers are happy, have
subscribed to the value of the brand, love the
company that it represents, and so on. I sometimes
wonder whether they are all fiddling while Rome
burns.
And then I stumble across a company that has understood its
customers, that has worked out why many of its customers aren’t happy, and
why those that are happy stay so.
They’ve asked customers who left and those who came back
why they did so. They’ve developed a smooth though not necessarily fast process
for aligning their proposition to customer needs, while making a good profit.
Most importantly of all, they haven’t striven for perfection,
or being world-class, but have just focused on being a lot better than their toughest
competitor. And they’ve been doing it for enough years to know what works
and what doesn’t, usually with a stable team of marketers.
My kind of marketer – the kind who usually is not allowed
to present at public seminars because competitors might be there!
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