Accenture report : Marketing: Underrated, Undervalued and Unimportant?
April 7th, 2006Always an interesting topic; what do other people in the organisation think of marketing? According to this Accenture article it is not very good news; marketing rates poorly as a contributor to a companies success.
The article than has this to say:
“So why is marketing getting so little respect or support from top executives around the world? We believe that two principal factors are at the root of the issue. The first factor, quite simply, is that many senior executives do not fully understand the role and purpose of marketing within their company—due, in part, because senior executives tend to have finance or operations, not marketing, backgrounds. According to Chief Executive magazine, just 12 percent of Fortune 700 CEOs have worked in marketing at some point in their careers.”
I agree that few people understand the function of marketing, but whose fault is that? Most CEO’s do understand the value of sales, even though they largely come from an operations or finance background.
If you are a marketer and you can’t demonstrate/communicate your own value in a firm, how are you going to demonstrate your companies value to a customer? The answer Accenture comes up with is a bit self-serving; it’s all about CRM of course and it won’t come as a surprise that the author, Patrick O’Halloran is a partner in the Accenture Customer Relationship Management group….
Marketers should identify their own performance measurement criteria and negotiate with other senior managers to get access to the tools they need, just like a production manager must argue his case for a new machine. Just maybe, a lot of marketers are not that keen on accountability?
September 27th, 2006 at 8:28 am
[…] The role of “marketing” is one of those subjects that often raises as many questions as answers. Now if people don’t excactly know what it is that you should be delivering, it is pretty easy to not deliver to a CEO’s expectations. (I wrote about a related issue, how marketing is rated within an organisation, here in response to an Accenture report with some interesting findings) […]
December 9th, 2006 at 1:23 pm
[…] The role of “marketing” is one of those subjects that often raises as many questions as answers. Now if people don’t excactly know what it is that you should be delivering, it is pretty easy to not deliver to a CEO’s expectations. (I wrote about a related issue, how marketing is rated within an organisation, here in response to an Accenture report with some interesting findings) […]