The American Marketing Association defines marketing as the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of ideas, good, and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational goals.” With that in mind, how much return do you think General Electric is getting on its new jet engine TV commercials? What about Mobily’s (a Saudi Arabian mobile operator) billboards placed in a football stadium in Spain?  And what do you think of the full page ads placed by Airbus in the Dubai-based Gulf News? Surely these campaigns cannot have any meaningful returns.

I ask myself, how do chief marketing officers (CMOs) manage to justify these meaningless investments to themselves and to their CEOs, but more fundamentally how did most marketing organizations around the world reach this sorry state? And if this is the case with supposedly highly professional organizations like GE and Airbus, how is marketing doing in smaller organizations?

I believe there is a bunch of factors that are contributing to the current state of marketing affairs. Some of those are internal to the organization and others are external. Let us first discuss the internal factors:

• Marketers have surrendered their budgets, creativity, business logic and even their will power to the agencies. Today agencies who in most cases do not understand your business get to decide on the shape of your marketing, which campaigns to run, which media to use and then overcharge you for it. Marketers find it easier to work through agencies and rarely challenge their wisdom, pricing or even quality of work
• Please the boss and tick the box culture which is prevalent in marketing organizations both large and small, I am sure I do not need to explain this one but many marketers found this approach to be  important for their survival
• Many CEOs have opted to hire weak (or friendly) CMOs. With a weak CMO, the CEO can shape and reshape marketing priorities, budgets and activities at his will
• Weak CMOs wanting to survive have accepted interference from every corner of organization, sales, finance, procurement, research and development and customer service departments all interfere in marketing strategy, plans and activities very frequently. In fact I do not think there is any part of an organization that suffers from the level of interference marketing is exposed to
• Refusing to be measured...marketers prefer to portray marketing as a creative artistic domain that cannot be measured numerically. This is of course a myth that was busted long ago but CEOs go along with it for convenience

You know as much as I do that marketing in your organization is suffering from most if not all of these issues especially if you are in a business to business industry. The question you should ask yourself is whether you can afford this mediocrity in an economic downturn? Maybe it was OK during boom time but now you might want to think again.

I will cover the external factors affecting marketing in part B (coming soon), in the mean time I welcome your feedback!

Ayman Abouseif