citizen Evangelist

Making and supporting a product why trying to grow a company is hard work. I’ve often told my non-co-worker friends that I imagine it to be very much like raising a child.

In the early days, before there is any real product, you have an idealized picture of what your baby will grow up to be: innovative, paradigm changing, etc. And then, after nine months of hard word, and a terrible period of labor getting the first version out to market (beta or first customer ship), you’re exhausted.

You were running hard for the finish line only to figure out that once released, the real work begins.

Each hour you pour more of your heart and soul into the application, working hard to craft it in a way which meet your understanding of the need and helps you to accomplish the revenues required to either keep your doors open or the investors happy enough to continue funding your efforts.

Inevitably, the customers who start using your product have a different vision for its future than you do. This is your baby, but it is their tool. And, like any good parent, you have to do what you can to provide the best environment for your child, but you have to let it grow up on its own. When you are exhausted, working hard, and already anxious because no matter what you do you’re not seeing the level of growth you though you would see when the whole process started, its easy to get edgy. Its easy to start to take comments personal.

The one thing we must keep in mind, its not personal. Its business. If our business isn’t helping others to get their business done, this it does get personal. For our customers, it gets personal really quickly.

When I see something like this, it makes me cringe. I know I’ve been frustrated at times… having my best efforts criticized, critiqued, and told it came up short. Its not fun.

But, you know what? It’s part of the process. One commenter on this post at 37Signals pointed out the irony of how the customer’s word choices so closely mirrored their own using Google as proof.

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According to one analyst (Gartner I believe), the F1000 spends 1 trillion on marketing annually. $1 Trillion USD. Not million. Not Billion. Trillion.

The Evangelists for Customer Evangelists once again reinforce my intuition with the note on “Marketing isn’t broke, Its Broken.” I think I’m going to need to subscribe to Forrester at some point… if Peter Kim is on the angle I think he may be. His write-up: Reinventing the marketing Organization offers the following executive summary:

Today’s marketing organizations are broken. Three out of four marketing
departments have reorganized in the past two years. Almost 80% of marketers don’t influence a critical customer interaction like customer service, and 85% don’t even own the “four Ps” of marketing anymore. To regain effectiveness, marketers must transition to a Customer-Centric Marketing Organization. Doing so requires: 1) redesigning P&Ls and metrics; 2) shifting culture away from marketing communications; 3) investing in a customer relationship infrastructure; and 4) rethinking agency relationships.

I’ve been toying with the idea of using “Fire Marketing“ as a provocative claim for the solution we’re working on building. I’ve been working around the marketing organization for most of my career so I’m well within that definition, but its clear that something needs to be done.

As I’ve continued to observe what is going on in the market, it is my assumption that marketing is largely being executed as a functional role, not a strategic mission. In its classical sense, the four Ps (Price, Place, Product, & Promotion) implies so much more than what most marketers are responsible for in today’s world. In most of the organizations I’ve worked with, Pricing is held by finance or the executives. Product is owned by engineering or product management. Place is owned by operations. Promotion is owned by marketing.

Peter Drucker once said “The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.” When the four responsibilities are separated like that, its really hard for me to call the function marketing. It seems only logical that it should be called promotion. If the only level you have to adjust is promotion, no wonder so much money is spent and spent so poorly.

This is a symptom of the organizational dysfunction that exists… and I suppose is, in part, the responsibility of marketers to educate their companies as to the right path.

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