Big Marketing Concepts

Marketing is everyone’s job. Organizations that are unfamiliar with marketing think of it as a box in an organizational chart. Instead, marketing is more productively viewed as what happens at every exchange between the organization and the customer. My model of truly integrated marketing shown below conveys some important concepts that the traditional boxes-and-lines organizational charts do not.

The model conceptualizes the organization surrounding the customer, with marketing being responsible for all points –– call them “touchpoints” –– where the various functional areas and the customer have contact. Examples of touchpoints include:

• Bills
• Communication tools (e.g., telephone, email)
• Yellow Page listings
• Building design
• Service staff

Managing these customer-organization interfaces is key to the success of service-based businesses. How is this model of the organization different from the traditional org chart?

• Most importantly, the centrality of the customer to every organization is explicit. If you don’t have customers, you don’t have a business; if your mental model of your organization doesn’t include customers, you won’t have a business.
• Second, the model emphasizes that marketing happens at every customer interface. Marketing is a part of every employee’s job, not the sole responsibility of a marketing department.
• Third, it shows that marketing is responsible for monitoring customers and markets, for providing feedback to the organization, and for advocating organizational changes on behalf of customers.
• Fourth, marketing “translates” the organization to the market. From the customer’s viewpoint, this means a seamless and satisfying experience. Achieving this requires marketing to foster integration and coordination among the organization’s various functions.
  

If you are good at thinking in three dimensions then you get additional perspective if you imagine the above model at the end of a “pipe” — the third dimension being time. Buyers and sellers are linked in a relationship over time. For most services and technologies, this relationship begins well before the sale and lasts until well after. The nurse sees the relationship as beginning when the patient is admitted and ending when he is discharged; the teacher sees the relationship with the student as beginning and ending with the academic year; the software installation team sees the sale as complete once the software is operational. But, in each case, the institutional relationship with the customer is bigger than that. Marketing is responsible for the continuity of the customers’ experience, and for optimizing and sustaining the buy-sell relationship before, during, and after every customer contact. This includes dismantling organizational silos and facilitating every contact that customers have with the organization’s service or product.

Strategic Marketing Management

One of my favorite questions to ask in the final exam of my graduate class is, “Describe how an iceberg is a metaphor for the discipline of marketing.” The best answers say something to the effect of the following: The lay person’s view of marketing is what one sees, which is limited to the tip of the iceberg — namely, advertising directed at the consumer. So it’s not surprising that the word “marketing” is misused by many as a synonym for advertising, communications, and selling. However, 90% of an iceberg is invisible, just as 90% of strategic marketing is invisible, to the customer. Beneath the surface are the market research and analyses, and the strategic choices this information supports. These myriad choices affect numerous variables, including:

• Qualities of the product/program/service being sold
• Distribution and channel decisions
• Monetary and non-monetary costs

The sum total of these strategic choices is substantially more important than advertising and selling. This is evident when the iceberg metaphor is extended. If you lop off the tip of the iceberg (the marketing communications and selling piece) it quickly sinks without a stable base to support it! Like an iceberg, marketing is far bigger than just the visible tip (brochures, ads, and selling). Integrated, contemporary marketing is the massive foundation that optimizes and sustains the buy-sell relationship before, during, and after every customer contact. It’s this hidden part of the iceberg (the market research and strategic decisions) that drives demand. Advertising is only the tip of the iceberg and shouldn’t be confused with the iceberg itself.