A recent survey by the Chartered Institute of Marketing, as reported in its on-line magazine Catalyst, makes interesting reading.
The survey suggested that trust across all areas of business is more important than ever, but with nearly half (45%) of business leaders having reservations regarding the level of professionalism across marketing, HR and sales functions. Concerns over marketing’s professionalism were the highest among small business leaders, with nearly a fifth of respondents (18%) ranking it as the lowest business function, with medium-sized firms (50 to 249 employees) coming in second at 15%. The findings indicate that small and medium-sized businesses are suffering from a lack of confidence in the level of professionalism from within their marketing assets, thus highlighting the importance of continued investment in continuous training with the latest professional certification.
What does” having reservations” regarding “marketing professionalism” actually mean?
Employers naturally expect that their employees will do what they are paid to do, but how well they do it is a different matter. With many marketers only staying in a job for not much more than two years, their apparent mobility gives rise to the questioning their professional commitment to their employment position.
The purpose of every business is to make money, yet many marketers seem to confuse the need to spend money on marketing communications and customer relations, with the overriding need to generate profitable income. The responsibility of every commercial manager is to produce and maximise sustainable flow of profitable income for the long-term future of the business, while minimising the use of investment and resources. Businesses look to their commercial managers and marketers to identify where resources should be directed, as well as how those resources should be used to generate profitable income. Commercial managers need to justify their decisions with measurable performance results, in order to gain and maintain the confidence of the business management.
Professional qualifications are important, in that they show a baseline of study and understanding. However, marketers need to demonstrate their ability to apply marketing theory to producing practical results. which is the key to business confidence and success. Ultimately an employer will evaluate a commercial manger or marketer on their ability to produce quantifiable results, and their contribution to profitable income.
Clear Job descriptions are important to ensure that the employee knows what they are employed to do and what is expected of them, and while such descriptions should not be too prescriptive, they should also include clear responsibilities and reporting lines.
Measuring performance is fundamental to successful management and the use of management ratios are a tried and proven method of achievement.
To demonstrate contribution, marketers need to consider:
- What information does the Chief executive need to know about the performance of the Marketing function?
- what specific management data and metrics are required for analysis and decision making?
For the commercial manager, there will be a different and more extensive range of data, as would be required by one directly involved in managing the marketing budget.
Each management decision making level will have a set of reporting data in order to monitor and manage their responsibilities. As each level collects data for its own management control and decision making, as well as for passing to the level above, so it becomes possible to establish an information data chain that extends from the lowest point, e.g. the customer/sales interchange to the chief executive. Through this chain of information data, the chief executive should be able to trace the connections from a marketing metric through to the causal area or actions.
In the main, chief and senior executives will be interested in metrics and benchmarks, rather than pure measurements. This is because metrics are the standards for measurement, providing target values that a company must achieve to reach a certain level of success. While measurements are the raw outcome of a quantification process, such as a company’s numbers, ratios and percentages, benchmarks on the other hand, are the very best measurements to which to aspire, the standard by which all others are measured. In most cases, benchmarks are therefore used to establish the value of metrics to be used for measuring satisfactory performance, at any particular time.
All marketing requires investment, so the effectiveness of marketing management must be clearly demonstrable to senior management, to further the internal understanding of the business’s marketing effort and justify the investment. For the commercial manager, metrics of marketing contribution, return on marketing investment and the “Optimum Marketing Performance,” will provide a performance picture of the marketing function which may be compared to the metrics of the other business doing, and finance areas of the business. The question of in what form, information is reported, is important to ensure information and data are prepared in a manner intelligible to the demander and comparable with data from other sources.
From the professional marketer’s point of view, measuring marketing performance allows them to prove their worth by measured results. Measuring performance should not therefore be a feared system of monitoring, but be seen as a tool of management efficiency by which all performance may be judged and rewarded.
Professionalism in marketing, as in any other business management process, derives from commitment to the organisation, working to achieve the business objectives and the use of quantified performance measurements to demonstrate achievement.
© N.C.Watkis, Contract Marketing Service 31 May 25