Marketing Is Not a Department

Marketing is not a department. For this, I constantly remind myself that how many big corporations wasted numerous of budget, time and resources in the marketing department. They constantly come up with numerous of the ad campaign and marketing budget to improve the sales and the awareness of the brand. But in the end, does it work? We don’t know. For a small player like us, we don’t deserve the luxurious of the marketing budget and resources to hire so much talent just for a marketing department.

The marketing department is an invention created by big corporations. In the general, people spent too much time spending in an old-school corporate environment, and they must have been fooled into thinking that marketing is a department. Look around us, how many successful companies in the recent require any marketing talent or campaign? Air BnB, Facebook, Uber etc.

Before we dive into the subject. Let us define what is marketing. Yes, it has something to do with increasing sales and growth of the company. But, then, what is the point of sales department? Every entrepreneur believes that marketing is one of the central pillars of the company. It’s the core of the whole organization. Peter Drucker, management guru of modern economic once mentioned: “Singular goal of a company is to create the customer, marketing gathers information, formulates product offerings, and develop a message to attract precious prospect. Sales translate interest and intent into dollars and cents.” It’s the role of the marketing department to craft and to develop the ideas or disseminate the messages to the target audience to stand out from the clutter and positioning the company’s offering in the marketplace.

What if the target audience is harder to reach than ever before? What if the target audience doesn’t wanna listen? The issue in this over-communicate era is people have too much choice to choose but too little time for them to listen. They don’t care about the product’s benefit that company wanna sell to them. SEO, Google Ads, Facebook advertisement, Youtube videos or any other platform is just a medium to reach the target audience in the noisy marketplace.

Why do people still insist to follow the obsolete and old-school corporation mindset? I believe, thanks for the engine of the Capitalism. Adam Smith devised the theory of “Specialization“ in his popular book, “The Wealth of Nations” that Specialization is a method of production where a business, area or economy focuses on the production of a limited scope of products or services to gain greater degrees of productive efficiency within an overall system. That is how we got the job title in every of the company and imprinted in our name card to be specifically designed for the job role that already created. Likewise, “if the only tool we have is a hammer, we tend to treat everything as if it were a nail.”

Recall that marketing is the core of the company, it is the most crucial central pillar of the structures. What if the company cannot be able to rely on the obsolete structure of the company but to be willing to adapt and to innovate themselves to embrace the changes of the economics. Marketing efforts need to be integrated with every individual in the company to achieve the overall objective. Marketing is an effort; mindset; a good discipline to willingly embrace failure as a lesson to constantly innovate and to explore. Quote the words of Eric Ries: “Every business plans are just a vision or hypothesis when the entrepreneur must validate the plan by experiment.”

 

“The most important word in advertising is TEST…..Test your promise, test your media, test your headlines and your illustrations, test your level of expenditure, test your commercials. Never stop testing and your advertising will never stop improving.”

-David Ogilvy, Founder of Ogilvy & Mather, and known as the father of advertising.