The Hindu Business Line : The challenge of selling `marketing'

IF a kind angel came to the marketing chief of your company and said: Ask for three things most critical to your success, one of the wishes might well be: "Please make my CFO and CEO understand the true condition of marketing and how it really works in our business (in other words, the way we see it!)." An important ingredient of corporate success, so all the books tell us, is for all the senior managers to think together and stay focused like a converging beam - rather than hold views that are strongly parochial and influenced by their own speciality, such as accounting, engineering or law. If indeed marketing and brands are too important to be left in the hands of the marketing department, then obviously other top managers and the Board must take a market-friendly approach to the total business. Sadly, this is not true in the majority of cases.

Thus, the job of selling the marketing function internally has survival value and it falls on the shoulders of the senior-most marketing person, say, the Vice-President. Of all the issues that cause division of managers into opposing camps and high tempers, easily the most common one has to do with pricing the product. It is of great interest to the head of finance, the managing director as well as the business planners simply because it drives both top and bottomlines. Although by now most well-educated managers concede that price is no longer internally determined on cost-plus-profit basis, the mental habits simply refuse to go away.

To an observer, it looks as if top management invests the decision with some degree of personal pride and prestige. A cut in the price is like lowering the flag or raising a white flag, an admission of defeat. It is seen by the people outside of marketing as an advantage that every salesperson craves in order to make life smoother for himself. This sets the tone for all discussions on internal proposals to reduce or anyway adjust prices, discounts, freebies and so on. "Give them a chance, `these fellows' will sell the company down the river" is still a lingering mindset amongst those top managers, particularly from the manufacturing and finance streams, who unconsciously cling to a different vision of business in the good old days.

More than the absolute amount of pricing itself, it is the uncertainty attached to any marketing forecasts (including the probable effect of changing the consumer price in either direction) that palpably annoys the meticulous planner. However, the fact of the matter is that all short-term sales or economic forecasting is a black art that defies exactness. Sometimes one can get compliments for the chance coincidence of events; often world events affecting the competition, regulations, trade and consumers can distort one's beautifully created models of reality. Engineers find this in particular difficult to swallow. Their training has been a lifelong quest for precision in estimation and aiming for control over events. To them, the explanations as to why either sales or margins fluctuate sound disturbingly like excuses and not `science' as they know it.

A third aspect which creates much mistrust and misgivings is the frequent revisions and appeals for a flexible approach to the trade, so typical of every sales and marketing person's daily life. Sometimes the theory behind why a particular promotion should work turns out to be wrong, and rather than stick to one's guns mulishly, it is often the better part of valour to retrace one's steps. Yet, this runs the risk of provoking "I told you so" reactions. Changing one's opinion on what will work in any product category, market, or season is neither shameful nor a sign of ineffectiveness. This might sound like special pleading of a failed sales manager, yet the task of living with the daily ambiguity of a changing and highly contested market is just part of life.

Other features of marketing that challenge the non-marketing mind's attempt to assimilate and comprehend are to do with the grey area of how and why consumers decide to buy - or not to buy - something. Both professionals and professors in the field know that there is no single unified theory of consumer behaviour. It is socio-culturally determined and full of contingencies and interacting causes. Selling too is an all-too human process, and results from a town or territory can change visibly with a change in the dealership or salesperson even if every other element in the marketing mosaic remains undisturbed. After all other aspects of product knowledge, planning and systematic selling are taken care of, it is indeed a matter of personal motivation and chemistry of relationships.

There is a further twist to this which is quite unique to non-exclusive dealerships. The typical dealership is a proprietary business, and the dealer is an independent businessman who likes to be treated as such - not as `a channel-member' or some inanimate conduit pipe. All salespeople know this in their bones. They automatically devise a variety of means of dealing with individual dealers with enough deference to their idiosyncrasies within `company policy'. In some parts of the country, stroking the ego is an elaborate ritual and a sales call on a major distributor entails a bit of drama on both sides. The head office mindset frequently finds this necessarily tedious process tiresome and rebels against it. As organisations grow large and their reach becomes nationwide, the trend to standardise everything is inevitable; and understandable to us - but not as obvious to the independent dealer. Resisting this by seeking exemptions in everything, from credit terms to form-filling and systems, is almost equally inevitable. And it is understandable to `them'!

The most difficult and subtle point underlying this `request for variation' (as it is seen at the centre) is the relative balance of power in the business. Beneath all the surface relationships, there is a dynamic tension between the marketer, the consumer and the dealers. Exclusivity of territory, non-competitive agreements, and the power of branding, proprietary products and processes are all strategies to tilt the scales in favour of the manufacturing and marketing arm of the triangle. Commoditisation works in the opposite direction. For someone used to a `controlling' or dominant relationship over, say, bankers or suppliers because of a favourable balance, it is often difficult to imagine why the trade is so hard to tame into submission. Moreover, the balance of power is never static, and it is not the same across business or product groups within - or across regions, outside. A company that has a 40 per cent share of a regional market gets so used to having dealers queue up for its custom that it feels like a fish out of water in other parts where it is a small player. And yet, there are no quick and easy managerial solutions - except to be patient and tolerant. And sometimes, deliberately slow down one's instinctive reactions to a provocation or message from the market.

All of the foregoing may well sound familiar generalisations to those steeped in the sales and marketing side of organisations. Yet they must make concerted attempts to persist with the internal marketing of these insights. If they fail to make their senior colleagues in finance, manufacturing and technology areas appreciate the nuances, much scarce time and energy will continue to be spent on settling highly repetitive and circular arguments, which, in these competitive times, is an eminently avoidable waste.

(The author is a student and observer of markets, people and organisations.)

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