magazines

Being good at everything

Being good at everything

Judie Lannon, editor of Market Leader, The Marketing Society’s quarterly journal delves into the history of our magazine and argues that marketers need to be good at everything

You may find this surprising.  I did.  Market Leader is the only strategic marketing journal for practitioners in the world.  Completely unique. So how did it happen and why aren’t there more?

Somewhere around 2000, Mike Detsiny (a past president of the Society) had the idea of a more  serious journal for the Society (we had the Harvard Business Review vaguely in mind)  and we looked around to see what already existed by way of business magazines. There are lots.

At the high status end are the general business journals like HBR, McKinsey Quarterly or other business school journals, but they treat marketing as very much a minor subject (usually pieces about sales gimmicks) and even then have little to say about consumers and communication.

Then there are the marketing, advertising, media and PR trade magazines, which have an attention span of about five minutes.  There are, of course, academic journals but they are pulverisingly boring and practically useless. And finally, there are consumer research journals – typically even more pulverisingly boring and useless.

Nothing addressed the needs and interests of the intelligent senior marketing director in a challenging day job looking for ideas and inspiration about how to do it better. Or indeed, the massed ranks of marketing services people who ought to stay abreast of what their clients are thinking/reading.

Why should this be the case?  I suspect there are a lot of contributing factors but a key thread that pops up every time I think about it is the very wide and rather vague definition of marketing itself.  Unlike advertising or media or market research where the basic ground rules and skills are clear and discrete and typically reflected in member organisations that are the same around the world), marketing is less clearly defined ranging from sales directors at one end of the spectrum to the jack of all trades entrepreneurial geniuses at the other end.  Yet, there are millions of books on marketing and branding.

Hugh Davidson (watch him in our video Library http://tiny.cc/hiika)  in his excellent article in the March issue of Market Leader includes an arresting quote attributed to Howard Morgens, chairman of P&G in the 1960s: “There is no such thing as a marketing skill by itself.  For a company to be a good at marketing, it must be good at everything from quality controls to financial controls.” When you think of it, many of the genuinely unique companies around the world don’t really spend a lot on visible, conspicuous marketing (Amazon, early M&S, Starbucks).  Indeed, it is arguable that the greater (or at least the more differentiated) the company, the less marketing is needed.  Consumers do it for them.

But there is no such thing as a bad company that does great marketing. (Unless you count an occasional flash in the pan creative advertisement.) So if you follow the logic of this view you could say there is no such thing as a great marketing professional who isn’t great at everything else.  Or at least is part of a great team.   But as marketing becomes more central to the vision of the company I suspect more journals like ML will appear.  In the meantime, help me find the writers and subjects you want to read about.

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