May I first of all make it clear that I am not a marketing person – in that I have never been formally educated in marketing, nor have I ever held a marketing job. I am an outsider looking in; someone who deals with, talks to and occasionally helps marketing people. My background, and therefore my experience and judgement, comes from a working life spent almost entirely (apart from a wonderful summer vacation job as a petrol pump attendant at Woolley Edge Services and three horrendous months as a Trainee Manager at British Home Stores) in the Business-to-Business environment.

This last fact has in itself has sown seeds of doubt in my mind as to whether I could do justice to a piece on Marketing Leadership. Only a week after agreeing to write it, The Sunday Times published a guide to the 100 strongest brands*, which would surely give me a guide as to who was doing a really good job of building their company’s image. But a quick search dashed all hope. There were no B2B brands listed – not even JCB, whose brand recently featured in a song that became a number one hit record. In this nation of consumers, Cosmopolitan, O2, Tesco and Specsavers win hands down and the wealth-creators are sidelined.

Creating an image that people want to buy into

From my position as an outsider looking in, I believe that your typical Marketing Director hardly ever performs the Marketing Leadership role. Before I sat down to write this, I did some research by asking some of my marketing clients how they would define the role, and the results were very interesting. Marketing Leadership is all about creating an all-encompassing image for the firm, something that the stakeholders in general and the customers or clients in particular can buy into.

In the 90’s we saw more and more firms selling “solutions” – you see HGVs on the motorway advertising themselves as “Logistics Solutions” and dustbin lorries that clearly state that they “Waste Management” – and yet many years before that a certain Joseph Cyril Bamford demanded to know from his staff on a daily basis how many machines bearing his initials were off the road, unable to work because they were waiting for his firm to supply spare parts. Joe was creating an image that his machines were there to work, and if an owner-operator’s machine was down then he, Joe Bamford, wanted to know about it. And it was more than an image – it was true. Joe cared, and that got him a reputed 95% of the owner-operator market in the UK.

Whose job is it anyway?

So, if Marketing Leadership is about creating the image and it comes from the top, whose job is it to make sure that the image is also the truth? At JCB Joe asked for the numbers on a daily basis - but what would have been the reaction if someone from marketing had “stuck their noses in” and asked?

I have countless examples of the disconnection between the vision set out by the senior person (or team) and what is actually going on at ground level. The vision can be found in annual reports, on websites and even in reception.

On one occasion I arrived at the head office of a billion pound manufacturing plc to find half a dozen six-foot-tall banners that had been used for subliminal messaging at a PR session for City investors. Two of the banners had quotes about “our satisfied customers”. Just a few minutes later, in a meeting with two of their marketing managers, I asked how they conducted customer satisfaction surveys. “Oh, we don’t do that” I was told.

Another example comes from Cytec, a $3 billion organisation that I contacted four weeks ago. Their website, then and now, explains their vision and includes the following quote: -

Total Quality Management principles

We are committed to continually improve in:
• Satisfying the customer.
• Having the minimum practical number of managerial layers—management supporting, coaching, and empowering employees.
• Performing only value-added activities and rigorously eliminating those which are not.
• Becoming effective and efficient in the performance of these value-added activities.
• Maximizing effective teamwork, both multi-functional and within the natural work group.
• Measuring our performance, correcting our deficiencies, and applauding our successes.
• Using the ISO 9000 Quality System in manufacturing and other functional areas.
• Above all, continuing to learn new techniques, new tools, and new methods to meet the challenges of the future.
Surprising customer surveys

I sent an e-mail asking who I should contact regarding customer satisfaction surveys. The reply I received from Tamara Berry, based in their U.S. Head Office, to my enquiry was as follows: -

Marketing Leadership does not simply belong in the Marketing Department – it sits company-wide, wherever anyone does anything that has a direct or indirect impact on how their customers see them; from quality assurance to accounts and from production planning to despatch, as well as sales, reception and service. Those involved in pure marketing are creating sub-texts to go underneath the image, to explain the image more clearly – “We are what you need because …” and the ‘because’s create the attraction for the buyer to buy.

False images

Marketing Leadership comes from the top of the organisation and it is the responsibility of the person at the top to make sure that the image portrayed is true…Don’t say you do and then don’t. Each company has an image that the customers buy into, and that image should be true at all of the customer-contact points. If the image is false then at best the customer feels disillusioned, and at worst will feel as though they’ve been lied to – except in the unusual and unlikely event that reality is better than expected, of which I have only one example that readily springs to mind, and that is Skoda.

Reality check

You may have gathered by now that my business is B2B customer satisfaction surveys. The subtext we use, within our logo, is Business Process Review. (B2B surveys are quite different from consumer surveys in that there is an ongoing relationship between the buying company and the selling company that should go on for years and years). As a worldwide organisation we have now completed more than 80,000 surveys and I have seen some dreadful disconnects in my time.

We are supposed to check the relationship our clients have with their most important customers, but all too often, when we verify the contact details we have been given, we are told that Mr Smith left the company several years ago, that Jones & Co haven’t had an XYZ machine since Adam was a lad, and that our client is not regarded as a supplier any more. Once we get over that first hurdle and actually find a customer, we then find out how true the image actually is – is our client seen as a solution provider, or are they seen as a provider of little problems that keep cropping up? Are invoices accurate? Does the sales person keep their appointments? Are changes to orders easy to make? Does the supplier provide valuable ideas that help to increase profitability?

To avoid the churn that always follows in the wake of disillusioned customers, businesses need to not only conduct regular reality checks, they also need to act upon the feedback they get. This sounds obvious, but listening to feedback can be uncomfortable, accepting other people’s opinions is not easy, and making change happen is often difficult. Probably half of the businesses that I see that have conducted their own “research” never really did anything with the feedback and the report simply gathered dust.

Good Management – Follow-up

Marketing Leadership, as any other management discipline, requires follow-up, and the most effective method that I have seen is along the lines of Deming’s Plan Do Check Act cycle**: -

• Create the image you want – why customers, suspects and prospects would choose to buy from you
• Run the business over a period of time
• Check that reality matches your image; measure the actual; get customer feedback; don’t be frightened or complacent
• Act on the results; include the survey as part of your continuous improvement programme; don’t let the report sit on a shelf gathering dust.

Can the marketing department do it alone? Of course not! Can it take the lead in defining what the business needs to do to make its proposition complete? Again, of course it should. Will people listen? So long as the message is consistent, logical, founded on data, repeated often enough, eventually they will. This is what the best business leaders like Joe Bamford do instinctively. The strange thing is that marketers who do this consistently will often end up running the show anyway.

Leadership is about a combination of vision and courage. Who better to develop a vision of the way the organisation should be than the Marketing Department? All you need then is the courage to push and shove the organisation to make it come true.

By John Coldwell
Managing Director, Infoquest CRM

Email: jc@infoquestcrm.co.uk
Web: http://www.infoquestcrm.co.uk
Mobile: +44 771 445 8599

Reference and further reading

* July 23, Superbrands – Britain’s Strongest Brands – The Sunday Times
** Note: The PDCA cycle was in fact originally developed by Walter A, Shewhart, a Bell Laboratories scientist who was Deming's friend and mentor, and the developer of Statistical Process Control (SPC) in the late 1920s.

John Coldwell was for many years an international industrial management consultant. For the last six years he has headed up the UK arm of InfoQuest, who specialise in B2B customer satisfaction surveys. To date they have completed more than 80,000 surveys across the globe with an average response rate of 73%.