To Solve Problems, Marcomm Organizations Must First Admit Them

I recently had a chance to consult on some marketing collateral documents for a major corporation. If you've been around the marcomm game long enough, you get used to spotting certain things; revealing signs of an organization suffering from budget and time constraints. This engagement was no different.

Some things I take note of when I see a document now:

Does the document immediately show you what the value proposition is? I mean, immediately? Quite often the answer is no. The reason is because to do that you have to have a great marriage of content and design, which the aforementioned constraints don't allow.

Most collateral is often copy heavy, packed with politically crafted paragraphs designed to appease product marketing teams internally.

The marketing managers creating the collateral, when they are not fending off such political intrusions, are juggling multiple roles, and have little expertise in crafting quality documents. They are writing their own first draft, or at least playing subject matter expert for a freelancer who knows little about the business.

The manager is also often playing junior graphic designer, raiding the corporate image repository, if there is one, or just their neighbor's or partner's collateral for some images. They don't commission unique photos or illustrations.

What things like this often underscore are the need for a skilled marketing services organization in house. But many marketing executives struggle to quantify the value of such organizations, and those skilled and product-knowledgeable employees are often the first against the wall when the layoff firing squad assembles.

So, what can be done? Well, a truly tech-savvy design firm can fill the void. But these firms have to market themselves well and show their value to executives, and cannot do that if the executives themselves don't have an ROI mindset and create a feedback loop.

And there's the rub, which I've seen all too often in marketing. It is too full of creatives who don't balance the other side of their brains. You have to focus on balancing creative excellence with data -- in the interest of fostering the creative and helping it survive.

You also have to be disciplined in marketing -- adopting the best practices of project management -- and many marketers are not. Isolated already from the customer, they are awash in internal politics that warp their messages. If you cannot prioritize and say no in marketing, seek and win change management consensus and managerial champions, you are doomed to failure.

To prioritize however, you have to have the courage to put the boss on the spot. You have to get him or her to know their business and communicate it to you. And you have to do that in a way that is diplomatic, yet effective.

That's why, as we read in marketing publications like BtoB magazine, the average CMO lasts just under 2 years. Because even their bosses don't know or can't communicate their priorities.

The challenges of marketing are highly personal, demanding a great deal from people. And a lot of people just get burned out because human limitations play themselves out in these high-pressure environments.

The first step to solving a problem, however, is admitting you have a problem. And most marketing organizations remain in serious denial.