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What's Broken in Marketing?

Listening in on a group discussion of senior marketers on "The Future of the Marketing Department" led by David Weinberger at the 2006 Innovative Marketing Conference (by Corante and the Center on Global Brand Leadership at Columbia Business School).

Why should customers trust companies? - Weinberger asks. He offered that companies are crazy if they think their brands are at the center of customers lives. Decades ago, if a customer wanted to know about a company or its products, the only source of information was going to the company itself. Now it's the last place a customer will go.

The group discussion has now focused on the question: What's broken in marketing today? A few ideas from the group...

- Decreasing efficiency of the advertising dollar (Chris Tolles, paraphrased -- "Brands like Burger King and Citibank are still doing a good job with their marketing... with a billion dollar budget, yes you can still be very effective and deliver customers. But it costs more to get those kinds of results than it used to." )
- The constant pursuit of short-term revenues
- Unrealistic goals "What's horrible about marketing is that we do ourselves a disservice by setting up unrealistic goals for marketing" (says Lois Kelley) -- e.g. saying "We're going to increase customer adoption of this product by 30% this year"
- Lack of trust. Marketing has a negative connotation among customers (e.g. on the blogosphere)
- Skills, training, and career development -- from business schools to in-house training -- are not supporting the skills needed today (many cries of assent from the audience)
- Marketing is not about "creating value for the customer" -- it is building demand among the customers (should it be?)

A new subject: If you starting a company from scratch, would you create a marketing department?

Or should marketing be distributed throughout the whole company, in its DNA? But how do you maintain a point of accountability? Or does the word "marketing" need to disappear -- something rather linked to strategy, or to customer? A department of customer experience? Another idea -- you need to have the brand's core idea that the company believes in, understood first, before you can form the initial marketing department. Marketing needs to be defined as including people outside the company...

Have to rejoin the offline world of the discussion... more soon...