For marketing to have a strong influence on the business, it needs to develop close relationships with other business units and external suppliers. This ensures that everyone is focused on delivering a user experience that meets or exceeds expectations.
Market Research
Market research is marketing’s closest ally, since it provides the consumer understanding needed to guide the strategy and optimize the marketing mix.
Finance
Marketing is one of the few investments companies consider to be optional. For established businesses especially, cutting marketing spend will not usually result in a sudden downturn in sales, but will reduce company costs and improve profits, which is why marketing budgets are often squeezed in order to hit short-term targets. However, marketing investment is vital to sustainable business success. Marketers need to provide clear evidence of the long-term return from marketing investment in order to justify and secure budget each year.
Research and Development
Marketers are responsible for guiding the company’s R&D (research and development) to create new products that consumers will value. The brief should be to find unique ways of enhancing people’s lives that are worth more that it would cost the company to deliver them.
Creative Agency
The role of brand consultancies and creative agencies is to come up with an idea, based on what’s special about the brand and its products, that resonates powerfully with potential customers. This idea becomes the underlying theme reflected in all the brand’s communications.
Media Agency
The media agency’s job is to find the most cost-effective ways of connecting with people in the target audience when they are receptive to hearing about what the brand has to offer.
Operations
In a perfect organization, the customer experience will live up to the marketing promise. In reality, operational limitations can result in delivery that falls short of the desired standard. Marketing and operational teams need to work closely together to ensure that customer expectations are matched consistently by what the company is able to deliver.
Sales
Marketing briefs the sales team on to what to sell, whom to target and which selling messages to prioritize. Being in direct contact with customers means the salesforce soon learns what is and isn’t compelling, so it pays for marketers to listen carefully to this feedback and use it to adjust the mix.
IT
Effective marketing depends increasingly on leveraging the multitude of data available on consumer behaviors and attitudes. Marketers need to know how to use this data to guide strategy and optimize marketing activities, working with IT specialists to determine how the data could be collected, analyzed and made available to the business to enable better decision-making.
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Dan White, author of The Soft Skills Book, The Smart Marketing Book and The Smart Branding Book
The Blake Project helps organizations and brands in all stages of development create marketplace advantages. Please email us to learn how we can help you compete differently.
Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education
