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Marketing failures – don’t always blame the marketing director
Just recently, there’s been quite a lot in
the general and marketing press about some of the really large failures in marketing.
A couple of big retailers come to mind (our love-hate relationships with these
big guys always ensures that stories about them grab our attention), but there
have been quite a few others, particularly in financial services and also airlines.
When you dig into these stories, you usually discover that behind the marketing
failure lies a much bigger failure – that of general management.
The first thing that should arouse your suspicion that it’s not just a marketing story is that stories of other failures emerge – supply chain management (particularly failed or problematic implementation of supply chain systems), disputes among directors, suppliers going public with accusations of incompetence, investors unhappy, even governance. Often, these stories only appear in the trade press relevant to the sector in question, so unless you read them, you might miss the clue. But occasionally, as with a large retailer’s supply chain problems, the stories hit the national media. Alarm bells should start to ring.
When you see repeated stories of failure, over several years, you know that something else is seriously wrong. You know that the company has a problem with general management. What you are witnessing is the process by which a company is punished because of its failure to appoint general managers who can build successful cultures and teams, and manage chain effectively and efficiently. Sadly, this situation is not uncommon.
Nor is it new. Studies which identified that big companies generate their own problems in terms of inability to cope go back decades, if not centuries. The membership of the FTSE100 (and the equivalent in other countries) changes constantly, as large companies take each other over, or simply decline into insignificance. This doesn’t happen by chance, for although there is a lot of evidence to show that mergers and acquisitions have their own problems (often because one poorly managed company taking over another because the former has illusions about the capacity of its senior managers to improve returns on the latter’s assets), the fundamental process is unmistakable – it’s called capitalism. It’s the process by which good management rises to the top and makes money, and by which poor management gets punished for its incompetence and (often) its arrogance.
That’s why the literature of company turnaround, which was very popular once, demonstrates that the start point of turnaround is to get rid of most of the senior managers, who are of course responsible for the decline in the first place. That’s why (in one case) appointing a CEO who used to work for the company is stupid – there is no way such a CEO is going to get rid of those who deserve to go. They are his former colleagues, and indeed the CEO may have been responsible for appointing some of them in the first place.
So, when you see a big marketing failure, particularly in a company you work in, advise, supply, buy a lot from, or invest in, probe deeper. The marketing director may be OK, but the company may be sick. |
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