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by Adam Joseph

on Jul 2

Marketing the marketers: the UK perspective

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This post is the fifth in a series looking at the AMI. Click below to read the others:

  1. What's wrong with the AMI
  2. The Great AMI Debate: Round 2
  3. The Stark Reality of the AMI
  4. The AMI Bites Back
  5. Marketing the Marketers: the UK perspective
  6. Bowll bites back: Geoffrey responds to the AMI

An interesting debate has been raging recently in the marketing community about whether or not the Australian Marketing Institute is doing a good enough job at marketing the marketing profession (check out the debate here, here, here and here to get up to speed). It seems to me that much of the debate centres around the twin questions of how marketers are defined and how they define themselves. So perhaps what we need to focus on is the question of defining marketing.

Roger James, Chairman of the AMI, went on the record to say that AMI membership currently stood at over 6,000 while his best guess of how many professional marketers there actually were in Australia was between 45,000 and 60,000. Which means around 90 percent of professionals do not belong to their main industry association.

So what might the future have in store for the AMI? Well, to answer this let’s travel back in time and space to the UK in September 2007. It was at this time that the Chartered Institute of Marketing – the AMI equivalent in the UK – published a discussion paper called Tomorrow’s Word: Re-evaluating the role of marketing (click this link to download the 18-page PDF).

As something of a radical move for the CIM, it proposed a re-definition of marketing for the first time in 30 years to “the strategic business function that creates value by stimulating, facilitating and fulfilling customer demand.” Yeah, thanks guys – that just rolls off the tongue at dinner parties and parents days when you’re asked what you do for a living.

I think there’s a much simpler definition - marketing is about being consumer-centric and putting the customer at the very heart of your thinking. As such, marketing is as much a philosophy of business as it is a department staffed by predominantly pretty-young-things.

Of course, my theory means you don’t have to have 'marketing' in your job title to be a great marketer - you may just as well be an entrepreneur or a managing director. I used to walk past a café every morning on the way into work where the owner would grill bacon every morning so the aroma enticed people into the café for a nice bacon roll. This is good customer-centric marketing - right product, right place and right promotion (call it 'sensory marketing' if you like).


But enough bacon-talk. The CIM discussion paper also put forward another interesting proposal, to sub-divide the marketing profession into three key specialisations. The thinking behind this was, if the legal profession can do it, why can’t we? The three proposed divisions were:

  1. Marketing “science”, covering research, metrics and segmentation
  2. Marketing “arts”, covering branding, advertising, communications
  3. Marketing “humanities”, covering social, public and not-for-profit marketing

The CIM claims this would “enable marketers to become experts in their field, rather than being expected to be all-rounders and then criticised for not understanding a particular part of the business”. However, I think there is a real danger in segmenting the segmenters, and the art/science division is a phoney one to me.

The truth is, marketing is both an art and a science. The best marketers will use both sides of their brains and have no trouble briefing a creative agency on the one hand, and evaluating the effectiveness of the agencies' output on the other hand.

I mention all this because of the widely held notion that Australia is a year or two behind the UK in terms of industry innovation in some sectors. If this is indeed the case, the naval-gazing of the AMI may well amplify and we might start hearing murmurs of a 'redefinition' of marketing here too.

But perhaps this is all overdue. In a recent survey by the Australian Institute of Company Directors and Growth Solutions Group, they found that 60 percent of company directors viewed their marketing function as an effective contributor to competitive advantage. But this means 40 percent are underwhelmed with their marketing function. And while 70 percent believed their marketing function effectively engages with their board, 30 percent of company directors surveyed thought it did not.

I also think the marketing profession could do with a bit of a rebrand.

I think maybe marketing suffers from the P-syndrome - allow me to explain. Once upon a time, there were the '4 Ps' of marketing – Product, Price, Place and Promotion. And then, at no extra cost, three more were added – People, Process and Proof. Arguably, the most publicly visible of these is the “P” for Promotion – covering all the above and below-the-line favourites like advertising, promotions, public relations, direct mail and so on.

Trouble is, a hell of a lot of strategic work goes into the other 6 'Ps' but this is just not as visible as the TVCs interrupting what you were watching on television, or the junk mail cluttering up your mailbox. But marketers are much more than just peddlers of advertising.

Talking of which, I’ve probably just taken up my 120-second spot so I’d better go now and do some deep strategic thinking

So what does everyone think - is it time we redefined the role of marketers? And if so, what definition of marketing would help us to better promote the work that marketers do?

10 Comments

The Marketer
  • Wrote on 2 Jul, at 05:36PM
Adam, I would like to applaud this very well written and insightful article/post and I agree.
l'Attitude
  • Wrote on 2 Jul, at 11:30PM
I've watched with some bemusement the very public debate on the shortcomings of the AMI, and while I do have some reservations about it's value to me (I live,study and work in Cairns, so it costs me a lot more than most to participate), I've been loath to join that debate without taking my concerns to the AMI first.

I do however have an issue with the chronic lack of defence by ALL marketers of the term marketing, and I think our profession is seriously diminished every time it is misused without demur.

Classic examples are

1) the use of the term "marketeers" to describe real estate charlatans who push overvalued property "investments" on the gullible. The media (bless 'em) are the principal culprits here, and they should be told to stop it. Now!

2) real estate salespeople who promise to "market" your property. It's called "promotion", boys and girls. They should be reminded of that. Often!

2) salespeople who publish "pop" books on "101 ways to ......." and allow themselves to be called "marketing gurus" without a scent of analysis or strategy. They should be stopped. Soon!

And while the AMI might be the principal driver in stamping out the prostitution of our calling, surely we as individual professionals can do our bit as well.

JV from l'Attitude in Cairns
Editor | Scotland
  • Wrote on 3 Jul, at 06:44AM
Great call JV - marketers themselves need to stamp out abuse of the term marketing, but this does raise the thorny question:

How do marketers define what they do, and who they are?

In a recent post on his blog, Jeremiah Owyang, web strategist with Forrester, social media brain and general online roustabout, attempts to tackle this difficult question of definition:

"In business schools, we were force fed many comprehensive, yet meaningless definitions of marketing – and were then forced to recite, write, and regurgitate it. Two days ago, Chris Kenton asked the community roundtable for their definition of marketing, I coughed up mine:

[Marketing is the act of connecting customers to products]

Usually, I’m very thorough in my blog posts, but this time, I’ll keep it simple. Submit your definitions below, or critique mine."


At last count, there were 79 comments from people keen to offer their own insight on this troublesome area of definition.

So I put it back onto the Australian marketing community:

How do we define marketing, and how does this definition help us to define marketers?
PrincePlanet
  • Wrote on 4 Jul, at 03:43PM
[Marketing is about creating a desire for something that people wernt previouly aware they had - and it's all about the strategy]

As marketers arent we all about strategy?, I would say that it's about the strategic and perhaps the tactical, marketing is the end game of everything we do. Accountants do accounting, planners do planning but the thing markets do is plow strategy into marketing delivery. Doubt if any of us will change the debate on "is marketing selling" and the answer is yes of course.
Marcus Absent
  • Wrote on 4 Jul, at 04:50PM
Marketing is the art of placing a machine at a venue that dispenses condoms on the night of a school prom and turns into a cigarette vending machine the next day for an AA meeting.
AdamJ
  • Wrote on 4 Jul, at 06:52PM
My earlier blog gives a UK perspective. But this got me thinking - what about an American one? America is after all the land where marketing first originated (or was it Marketingland?)

A quick look at the American Marketing Association website reveals the official stateside definition:

Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.

So there you go. It seems that marketing is offering everything to everyone.

www.marketingpower.com/AboutAMA
The Marketer
  • Wrote on 6 Jul, at 10:32AM
How do we define marketing, and how does this definition help us to define marketers?

Easy Scotland, let’s get a bunch of marketers together and: create a professional marketing body, start a accreditation process to benchmark marketers, create a Code of Professional Conduct, define practising standards for marketers and promote the benefits of marketing and marketers to the wider community.

Sound familiar? Yes...the AMI, but its broken and we need to fix it.

Like any business, if the top of the organisation has no vision, then even the best ideas will fail.

Marketings battle for the mind is stagnating....we need evolution or revolution.
AdamJ
  • Wrote on 15 Jul, at 02:30PM
Something else just occured to me about the Chartered Institute of Marketings proposed split of the profession into marketing arts, marketing science and marketing humanities.

Things are often defined with reference to their opposite - us and them, good and bad etc. So if people specialise in marketing humanities does that mean all other marketers are in-humane?!

And if you worked in social marketing would this suggest that everyone else works in antisocial marketing?! CIM, we salute your efforts from down-under ... but back to the drawing board ...
Lachy
  • Wrote on 15 Jul, at 05:03PM
I'd have to agree with you Adam. Because then we'd have "un-scientific marketing"... which the accounting department would never allow. And "in-artistic marketing", whatever that is (probably involves ordering branded stationary). And, as you said, "in-humane" marketing, which probably involves whale-meat, cheap cosmetics and tele-marketing.

I think that as a profession we should be more interested in our personal development than our title and what it infers.

I recently met someone at a conference, he was baby-boomer age (i'm quite a bit younger), on his business card he had: AMI, CIM, CPM, MBA etc etc etc. and he was as arrogant as you could imagine.

Accountants aren't "in accounting" anymore, they're "CPAs" or "CAs" and they have no hesitation telling you as much.

Qualifications such as those (and the CPM) are like the path to the dark-side. Think about it. How many people really do a CPA, a CPM or an MBA because they're genuinely interested and think its going to make them better at their job? Forget it. If you're considering one its because you want a pay rise.

So long as the AMI, AFA, ADMA etc continue to offer insightful and practical courses that reflect the contemporary needs of someone working "in marketing" - i.e. they allow me to be more effective in my job and to adapt and leverage new consumer trends - then i've few qualms.

Think outside the square. Look around yourself and figure out what you need to know to be better at what it is you do and then go find someone who teaches it. If its not the AMI or the CIM, well... whatever. (e.g. perhaps the digital landscape is a bit beyond you, but boy could you contribute more to meetings if you understood it. Well the AFA and ADMA both run what look to me to be fantastic short courses.)

Want to play with the "big boys" in the accounts department? Focus on your research and focus on results.

If you're good at what you do then who cares what your title is. And if you've put together a killer strategy for a big idea that will "change the game" and your superiors still want to count their beans and keep towing their tired old (flat) lines, then maybe take a leaf out of Gen-Ys book and look for a new company where its ok to have ideas and a voice.

Or maybe i'm too green to really know what i'm talking about.
AdamJ
  • Wrote on 16 Jul, at 11:37AM
I think youre absolutely right Lachy - people tend to get far too caught up in their job titles and also with professional pomposity.

AdamJ,
PhD, MBA, jedi.knight
Vice President of Intergalactic Marketing, Integration, CSR and Jargon

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