Marketing
Issue No. 40 - April/ /
Accountability is still a dirty word
by Kimon Lycos
Marketing is one of the great professions where the wily and slick seem to manage to escape behind a barrage of finger pointing. Far different to say engineering, where if something breaks, snaps, explodes, implodes or simply won’t work it’s easy to track the culprit.
To be successful, marketing relies on so many different factors that are hard to measure, that incompetent marketers are too often able to shrug their shoulders when sales slump and declare: “I didn’t do it.”
Fingers can get pointed at sales staff, at the product, at changes in the market, at the brief given to them, etc.
Marketing success depends on all those things and more. But when it comes to asking for and getting ownership from marketers, too many find a slippery pole to exit on. Not many can contemplate giving a Board of Directors a presentation, clearly explaining marketing’s impact under their leadership.
Which is maybe why, in the B2B world, where marketing is concerned we tend to think “we have to it” rather than “we get to do it”. Because leadership and accountability are too often lacking, many marketers don’t get the support they deserve because the top guys don’t have confidence in them.
As competition intensifies and growth expectations increase, B2B marketers are under pressure to deliver measurable results and demonstrate clearly the value they provide. To succeed in this new era of accountability, marketers must con...
