The Hindu Business Line : Marketing's urgent makeover

With success in the new marketplace calling for more than selling, promotion or advertising combined, the time has come for marketing to be given a makeover.

All over the world, free market capitalism is seen marching with a fairly confident and assured step. Winning in such a marketplace demands more than selling, promotion or advertising combined.

It is time for marketing to be given a thorough shake-up and a makeover. This applies to both the academic and the practitioner. For far too long, marketing professionals have allowed a muddled view to prevail, due to an understandable but avoidable confusion between two definitions. The first is the process of marketing, an abstraction that can now be set at rest as simply the competitive and mutual exchange of value.

The second is about what happens inside companies, what managers do, that is, the marketing management function. The latter has long been relegated to a unidirectional view, looking out from the firm to the outside marketplace. In the process, the old cliché about marketing being customer-focussed or customer-centric has been allowed, in practice, to remain a motherhood statement.

It is time that the fraternity stood up and let ourselves be counted. We cannot be paralysed by the awkwardness of a fuller and more realistic definition of marketing, which might lay us open to the charge, from our fellow managers, that we are trying to arrogate to ourselves nearly all of management's seriously long-term functions!

Levitt impact

The truth is, we have been living with the anomaly for over four decades. In 1960, when Theodore Levitt wrote his celebrated Harvard Business Review article on `Marketing Myopia', the world was vastly different.

The expressways were still being built, and a long string of suburban areas stretching for miles around every metropolis around the world, offering shopping at huge shopping centres, malls and supermarkets were all not even dreamt of. Television was in its infancy; truly worldwide brands were not even remote possibilities. The Internet, of course, did not exist.

In other words, the ways in which the marketer could sell and promote and communicate the benefits of his wares were not very different from what they had been fifty years earlier. Yet, Levitt shifted focus away from the front end, or the movement of the goods off the shelves through appropriate promotional and other devices, towards a famous question: what business are you in? This was a warning note, or should have been, to CEOs and even the business policy professors that their turf was about to be invaded! Instead what happened over the years was that the marketing profession got enamoured of its own wizardry, the power of using (read manipulating) the so-called 4Ps, especially advertising, to create product awareness, liking and preference — and eventually an image of the brand endowing it with values far beyond anything intrinsic to the product.

New ball game

This was the era of the product-plus, the USP and focussing on the differential. Original advertising greats such as David Ogilvy, Bill Bernbach, Rosser Reeves, and mavericks like Jerry Della Femina strode the marketing stage.

With the spread of consumer financing and colour television fuelling supermarket sales, a whole new ball game developed which was part show biz and part salesmanship, which emphasised the sizzle as much as the steak as a way to sell (and a reason to buy) particularly nationally advertised and displayed brands.

Not surprisingly, people made yet another anomalous connection, advertising as the key player in brand building. Because this was exceptionally strong in the field of packaged consumer goods, marketing textbooks abounded in examples from Unilever, Nestle, Proctor & Gamble and J&J and others of that ilk.

Industrial goods were supposed to be sold rationally and bought and therefore less susceptible to marketing in the then most popular sense of the term. The implication was, of course, that other types of selling were in general appeals to unreason!

The wrong end

No wonder then that the word marketing as well as the profession conveyed something superficial, ephemeral, and trivial. At any rate, it was not taken seriously by the scientist or the policy maker in government, but, in fact, was meant to be reined in to prevent it from promoting wasteful consumption.

That this image perception did not change for nearly three decades was thanks largely to the breathless and self-congratulatory excitement brought to the field by the bright young things surrounding marketing. The product managers, the flashily-attired advertising copywriters, film script writers and producers, selling and positioning gurus all joined in an unceasing chorus that promoted the wrong end of marketing — one that took over when, in a manner of speaking, the manufacturing people had already filled the warehouses.

So much was expected of the persuaders, hidden and otherwise, that when a CEO said: "Our marketing is doing a great job," he basically meant the sales force, advertising agencies, dealerships and promotional planners were combining well to bring in the orders.

The Japanese in their TQM language, of course, were more down to earth and called all this part of a process of order procurement and fulfilment.

This was a far cry from marketing standing for a view of the business that asked the strategic questions: is the business we thought we were in not too narrowly defined?

Does it have a long-term future? And where are we going with it?

In other words, through the next three decades, the myopia was only strengthened.

Meta Marketing

One of the wrinkles on this situation was also language. Having related marketing in the public mind more or less to `taking the product to the market', it would be extremely difficult to take that sense away from the word.

However, unless one took the broader, comprehensive view, there was no way the organisation could even be mentally prepared for shocks and surprises that were inevitable in a worldwide market place. Its very survival would be at stake, as American industry realised after the oil shocks of the 1970s and 1980s.

Simply carrying the product to the customer was not going to cut it any more. Reasonable quality, an economical price and good distribution were no longer all that mattered. Taking our own economy as an example, we reached this stage in many Indian industries only in the past fifteen years.

Marketing therefore has now become for us synonymous with increasing, international competition. A marketable quality was not a competitive advantage, but mere entry fees to the table.

What of the future? All over the world, free market capitalism is seen marching with a fairly confident and assured step. Winning in such a marketplace demands more than selling, promotion or advertising combined.

The survival need is to adopt what I have always preferred to call a Meta Marketing approach, to distinguish it from the more conventional definition described so far.

The difficulty, however, is one of organisational politics. Although Peter Drucker fifty years ago called marketing and innovation the only truly strategic functions of a business, the CEO has always found it an unhelpful definition.

Did that mean he has to be the leader of both? Or was the head of marketing a virtual deputy CEO? Then what about the functional performance required from him, delivering the sales target, managing customer relations, maintaining market share and so on?

The real crunch

The answer to these questions is fairly simple. The company needs both. The CEO needs a person at the vice-president level who mans the ship and ensures the achievement of the annual marketing plan.

He needs another who is also charged with the longer-term thinking for the company, new product development as well as marketing innovation.

The real crunch is that the way we prepare managers through their careers does not naturally foster or throw up such all-rounders within the organisation. True generalists, with practical knowledge and a breadth of imagination and understanding, are rare birds. Finding them is hard, keeping them is more so. On top of this, the traditional channels of grooming the future CEO continue to be technical or accounting oriented, with the result that the chief is not a natural candidate for the strategic marketing job.

This is probably the toughest hurdle, but it can be remedied if the corporate board decides to embrace the redefined philosophy, the point of view and the attitudes of Meta Marketing.