Confessions of a Corporate Marketer – By Glenn Schmelzle

Spending nearly 15 years in marketing departments has let me see what the pressures of corporate politics can do to the best of us. Several times in my own past, I’ve turned away from trusted marketing principles in favor of whatever took away that day’s pain-point. Rather than get depressed by these examples, you might get a chuckle out of them:

Marketers can bring in all kinds of outsourced expertise (including demand generation experts) but they can never delegate away their corporate strategy. Why? Because marketing’s raison d’être is to marry a company’s actions with what’s going on in the outside world.  Outside suppliers can validate assumptions, but they can’t discern where the company wants to go. How can you give directions to someone when they can’t say where they’re going? Once marketers effectively communicate the strategy with these experts, they can reasonably expect to reach their goals.

Marketers must keep their eye on the ultimate audience for their campaigns, despite all the activities involved with pulling this off. Oftentimes, they can get obsessed with the machinery (Ooh, new multivariate analysis software! There’s a hip graphic designer on the scene!) and forget that their goal is to reach prospects and generate responses. They can end up shoe-horning the latest fad into their plans, even when it runs counter to what they’re trying to achieve. There are successful companies out there that still use old-fashioned techniques. Though not cutting-edge, I have to believe that they’re still used because they still work.

Marketers like to say they support the ‘one-on-one’ marketing model, but they shy away from implementing it. Usually, they’ll assign targets to one of several segments that are sent slightly different messages. They seldom go beyond that, because there’s no clear way to know when you’ve immersed yourself enough in the customer experience. True, it takes effort to sit in with sales reps on some demos, or do your own follow-up calls with some leads, but taking part in the dialogue rewards you with priceless insight into the market’s needs.

Marketers need to share campaign results, even when they’re bad. The truth is that bad results teach us even more than good results. When those campaigns are run in data-rich environments (like the web) we can pinpoint problems and solve them. When marketers sweep bad results under the rug, they unwittingly take on the much bigger job of diverting attention from the flop. I worked for a company that hadn’t done much direct mail until their VP decided to run a 10,000-piece campaign. The VP never said a word about the failed campaign (not one solid prospect) but shifted to methods that didn’t carry such cut-and-dry response rates. I wonder how differently it would have turned out if he had been successful at getting management buy-in to keep tweaking the direct mails in test cells until the campaign worked. I’m sure it wouldn’t have cost as much money and political capital as he ended up spending.

We have to understand these mistakes, lest we repeat them. I’m no psychologist, so I don’t pretend to know why we sometimes sabotage ourselves with these actions. I do know that whenever I’ve seen this happen, it’s hurt marketing’s cause instead of helping it. Avoiding these tendencies makes our profession stronger, and raises our companies’ ability to succeed.

This guest post was written by Glenn Schmelzle glenn.schmelzle@utoronto.ca Or follow him on Twitter @heyglenns or check out his Blog at Marketing What’s New