Every day in large corporations around the world, hundreds of decisions are made about products (what is offered) and marketing (the customer experience). Individually, these decisions may seem benign, but in the aggregate, they are bet the company decisions.
Think about it. These decisions define significant investment in terms of marketing spend. They define your brand. They define how your products and services meet customer and consumer needs. They define your customer experience and your promise. It’s amazing the power of the decisions. Most recently some companies, like GE and Samsung, have been getting it right more often than not. Others, like HP and Sony, have been making a lot of losing bets.
Bet the company decisions are never without risk, but you can dramatically improve your odds with a consistent process. In a day when companies enforce rigorous process standards to squeeze every last dime of savings from their supply chain and manufacturing facilities, we are continually surprised by how often marketing gets a pass.
In most companies we visit, marketing lacks a structured framework, tool set, skill set, or competency model. Depending upon product group, region, or business, we most often see marketing making decisions inconsistently within and across platforms. Priorities and goals may be established, but they are not enforced with a common set of tools or templates to ensure consistent decisions and fully developed answers.
As marketing consultants, we do not advocate a rigid process a la supply chain because marketing needs flexibility. However, we strongly encourage adopting a clear framework backed by tools and templates that enable consistency. The business logic and proof is undeniable—speed in decision making, common language and nomenclature, ability to compare and contrast performance, transferability of lessons, people and best practices—but adoption remains low when compared to other strategic business processes.
We have seen the benefits of employing a common way of marketing. Consumer product companies lead the way and are considered by many to be the best marketers in the world. We urge all marketing and business leaders to adopt a common marketing framework. By enforcing some rigor and consistency, you will not only improve marketing’s performance, you will also better align yourself with your peers in other functional areas.