Marketing Insights From a to Z: 80 Concepts Every Manager Needs to Know

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Marketing Insights from A to Z

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Marketers, in turn, are critical of other departments:
• Marketers have difficulties with engineers. Engineers tend to
be exact in their thinking, seeing black and white and missing
shades of gray. They tend to describe the product in highly
technical terms rather than in language that most customers
would understand.
In high-tech companies, the engineers are king. The engi-
neers look askance at any engineers who went into sales, con-
cluding that they must be poorly trained. If they went into
customer service, they were really losers.
• Marketers see their immediate enemy as the finance people
who demand that marketers justify each expense item, and
who hold back as much funds from marketing as possible. Fi-
nance people think mainly of current-period performance and
fail to understand that a large part of marketing expenditures
are investments, not expenses, that build long-term brand
strength. When the company hits a slump, finance people’s
first step is to cut the marketing budget, implying that the
funds aren’t necessary. The antidote is to work closely with fi-
nance to develop financial models of how marketing invest-
ments impact revenues, costs, and profits.
• Marketing people complain about the purchasing people if
they buy cheaper inputs that result in the product not having
the quality promised in the value proposition. True, the pur-
chasing people must keep input costs low, but controls must
be established to ensure sufficient quality.
I advise marketers to work more closely with the purchasing
people not only to ensure good quality but to learn from
them about selling. Purchasing people are experts at what
makes good salesmanship. Why? Because purchasing people
are approached all day long by salespeople and can tell stories
about the difference between effective and poor selling styles.
Marketing Department Interfaces
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It would be good training for marketers to work in purchas-
ing for a while to learn how to deal with salespeople.
General Electric once developed a game to be played be-
tween its own purchasing and sales personnel to see who
would be more effective. The purchasing people won hands
down. GE’s management then said: “If our salespeople cannot
sell effectively to our own purchasing people, how can they sell
effectively to our customers’ purchasing people?”
• Marketers have only a few issues with the manufacturing peo-
ple. They hope that the manufacturing people produce the
products at the specified quality level so that the customers
aren’t disappointed. They also ask manufacturing to make
special short runs or add custom features, but here they en-
counter some resistance. Manufacturing costs rise when pro-
duction changes must be frequently made.
• Marketers find it hard to communicate with information tech-
nology (IT) people. The marketers talk sales, market share,
and margin, while the IT people talk COBOL, Java, Linus,
and tetrabytes. The big mistake is when marketing asks IT to
develop a database marketing system, only to regret commis-
sioning it in the first place once it is finished. Yet marketing
needs database software and supply chain software if cus-
tomers are to be served well. Clearly, marketing departments
need to add a technical marketer who understands informa-
tion technology and can mediate between the two groups.
• Marketers get upset with the credit department when credit
refuses to approve a transaction on the grounds that the
prospect might default. The salesperson worked hard to get
the sale only to find that he or she can’t put it through and
get recognition for the sale.
• Marketers are annoyed with the accountants who are slow in
answering customer questions about their invoices. Marketers