In this podcast I put it all out there.
I was reading some posts this morning on LinkedIn concerning marketing. As everyone chimed in one issue jumped out at me.
Marketing has a Marketing Problem.
It’s plain to see that “marketing” as an industry, function and marketing people have a positioning problem. Nobody can agree on exactly what “marketing” is. Somehow “marketing” lost it’s way.
Somewhere between the mass adoption of micro-computers to now, marketing as a corporate function has lost respect in the boardroom and is wildly misunderstood by most companies – particularly mid-sized and smaller B2B companies.
B2B is quite different from B2C – however, because people see B2C all the time, they attempt to apply B2C tactics to B2B markets. This just makes the confusion deeper.
Thus a lot of marketers feel pressure to essentially teach marketing to the rest of the organization at the expense of DOING the marketing. And since it takes every fiber of one’s being to be a successful CMO – there is no room to convince, explain or cajole. You barely have time to DO the marketing.
People hire experts all the time only to demand that they understand every tiny detail and theory of why the expert is doing what he/she is doing. Yet this same person doesn’t go to the doctor and ask how cellular reproduction works – they just follow the doctor’s process.