The Subversion of Sales & Marketing. How can it be corrected?
Part 1: The Inciting Incident ... in 5 elements.
This struck me forcibly:
Somewhere between the rise of social media and the death of critical thinking, marketing ceased to be a discipline and became a department. Worse, it became the department with the lowest barrier to entry and the highest volume of opinion. Marketing, once a serious strategic endeavor rooted in market insight, customer logic, and value co-creation, has been reduced to the production arm of executive vanity: it exists now to “tell the brand story,” to “make us look good,” and to “go viral.” What used to be the art and science of navigating market complexity is now a content calendar in a Canva template. The impostor that sits in the boardroom wearing marketing’s name tag is not a marketer. It’s a communicator dressed as a strategist, a tactician armed with KPIs that don’t matter, a loud voice with no ear to the ground.
It’s the opening of an essay by Jef Teugels. A few months ago, here on Aargh! by David Pinder, I featured another piece by Jef. He really is a most excellent Thinker and Thought-Prompter!
Jef’s comments about Marketing are spot on. Tactics are overwhelming Strategy at every turn. There are still centers of excellence, of course, but they seem to be few and far between. Too often, the level of what these days gets termed Marketing is a derisory facsimile of a once-meaningful function.
Something else is messed-up, too: Sales … which, allied with the Marketing debacle, inevitably means that the entire Sales-Marketing dynamic gets screwed up. This has been a talked-about topic for as long as I can remember, but right now, it seems to me, Sales and Marketing are far too often out of sync. Way out of sync … sometimes completely, utterly, off-the-scale dysfunctional.
Decades ago I jumped into the Sales & Marketing world and thoroughly enjoyed it. Not least, it was populated by some hugely intelligent and inspiring people. As it still is. I know this for a fact because, even as I dive deeper into my dotage, I’m still privileged to be working with some enterprises to address today’s issues.
So why, oh why, does the Sales & Marketing disconnect and confusion persist? What caused the conflict in the first place? In the run-up to the millennium I think it fair to say that the issue showed signs of resolving itself, but since then the two functions have become ever more separated. Why? And can it be sorted out?
I’m interested in addressing two issues in particular:
The Sales & Marketing Strategy vs. Tactics Chasm
The Customer-Supplier Interface Challenge
… BUT to get anywhere near those elements there is the need, first, to get the bigger picture into perspective by reminding ourselves how we all got to this point. Otherwise, the present situation will continue to lack context and won’t make much sense.
So, here, to begin at the beginning - as Part 1 of any series surely should! - let’s draw attention to …
The Inciting Incident - Something Happened!
Change always needs a trigger. And maybe 29 June 2007 was just such a ‘Go! date. It’s when the iPhone was launched, and it seems now to be regarded as the point in time that marked the fulfillment of a historical transformation - the end of the Electromechanical Era and the true commencement of the Digital Era. But a great deal had already happened before the iPhone was ever thought of, let alone appeared.
You could go back all the way to the mathematical contributions of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace (Lord Byron’s daughter, no less), and others, in the first half of the nineteenth century. Or to the work of Alan Turing during the Second World War. Or note the fact that, in 1944, IBM introduced its first electromechanical calculation machine - the Harvard Mark 1. Or that, in 1948, a team at Bell Labs announced the invention of the transistor.
These developments were all harbingers of what was to come … but they did, of course, also bring about changes at the time they were introduced. The transistor, for example, enabled electronic goods to be made much smaller and more powerful than the vacuum tube (valve) counterparts they replaced, and, for a time at least, the ‘word processor’ positioned a computer as the typewriter reborn.
The point is, we humans do things when they become possible. Of course we do. We don’t hang around to contemplate all of the immediate repercussions of any actions, let alone where those changes might lead in the longer term.
And, of course, we are especially inclined to act quickly if there is short term financial gain to be had! And, boy, even when digital technology was in its infancy, the small monochrome screens started flashing ‘Gold Rush! Act Now, Now, Now!’
Why? Because it became possible to reconfigure the business enterprise. Not in a small way … not in a tentative way … but, rather, the whole nine yards.
The 21st century business enterprise, born in the final decade of the 20th century, was an entirely new concept, not just a step change but a revolutionary leap.
For context, here’s a snippet from the work of American legal expert and political theorist, Philip Bobbitt. In a 2002 book1, he posited a list of six Constitutional Orders that have carried the Western world from the Renaissance to the 21st century. The three most recent of these Constitutional Orders are:
State-Nation - 1776 to 1870 - “The State will forge the identity of the nation.”
Nation-State - 1861 to 1991 - “The State will better the welfare of the nation.”
Market-State - 1989 and on - “The State will maximize the opportunity of its citizens.”
And Bobbitt makes this specific point about the business enterprise:
[T]he corporation was a Nation-State vehicle to improve the welfare of its citizens. Replacing the great trusts and partnerships of the State-Nation, the corporation bureaucratized the management of business, making it feasible for the State, through regulation, to temper the profit motive with concern for the public welfare, replacing the enterprising if ruthless entrepreneur with the modern manager.
This analysis would seem to tally with contemporary reports. For example, in The Diary of a Nobody, first published in serial form in the satirical Punch magazine in 1888 and 1889, there is reference to an enterprising and possibly ruthless entrepreneur. The diarist, Charles Pooter, is writing about the upcoming marriage of his oddly-named son, Lupin, to Miss Lillie Posh:
During the evening I had an opportunity to speak to Lupin, and expressed a hope that Mr Posh was not living beyond his means.
Lupin sneered, and said Mr Posh was worth thousands. ‘Posh’s one-price hat’ was a household word in Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, and all the big towns throughout England. Lupin further informed me that Mr Posh was opening branch establishments at New York, Sydney, and Melbourne, and was negotiating for Kimberley and Johannesburg.2
I know, I know, that’s a satirical reference at the tail-end of the State-Nation era, but you get the idea?
Then, through most of the 20th century, a rather more house-trained version of the business enterprise came into being to help, as Bobbitt describes it, “better the welfare of the nation”.
Directly linked to the nation and society that it served, this 20th century version that provided employment for a range of people, was a fully integrated, vertical structure. That is, all functions (for example, manufacturing, finance, marketing) were in one geographical location, or were closely situated, and the whole was governed by a military-style hierarchy with, so to speak, the boss in the penthouse and the janitor in the basement.
Thus, a company workforce often was a reflection of its local community - individuals and families who knew one another as friends (and enemies!) and neighbours as well as co-workers - and persisted across generations.
A further key factor was that the 20th century corporation was far more likely than its 21st century successor to “do its own thing”. Although management science did become more and more influential as the 20th century progressed, individual companies were far more likely to deploy ‘local rules’. This local autonomy led to a high level of variation.
Functional integration in manufacturing began in earnest in the 1970s but digitalization really made its presence felt when, in the 1990s, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems arrived on the scene. SAP R/3, launched in 1990, was revolutionary, and from that point onward more and more enterprise functions were captured in the frame.
Up until that point, so far as products and services were concerned, there was usually a much greater association between quality and price. Quality cost more. High quality cost a lot more. The range of offerings was distributed across the range of options. (Which, by the by, surely means that, arguably and ironically, there was far greater diversity, does it not?)
The new technological solutions represented a victory for the universal potential of mechanized and standardized functions and practices. And that is when - if you’ll forgive the mangled metaphor - the Inciting Incident leapt out of the bottle …
Inciting Incident Element #1 … Global Outsourcing!
The 1990s, and the realization dawned that, for the first time ever, enterprise functions could be distributed around the world without loss of efficiency or effectiveness. Quite the reverse, in fact. After all, away from the West, cheaper labour was plentiful. And an ever-increasing array of specialist functional services - accounting, procurement, HR … you name it - were app-ing their way into existence.
So, unilaterally, Western companies, enthusiastically encouraged and aided by management consultancies, spread their functions, de-industrializing the West in the process Then in the 2000s, the activity ratcheted up even further. The West’s blue-collar workers were thrown on the scrap heap but, hey, ‘Best Practice’ was on the march.
Inciting Incident Element #2 … the Demolition of the West as we knew it.
The full effects of Element #1 took a while to sink in. This, despite the fact that, back in 2002, Philip Bobbitt (quoted above) had had this to say about the concept he had labeled the Market-State:
In the market-state, the marketplace becomes the economic arena, replacing the factory. In the marketplace, men and women are consumers, not producers (who are probably offshore anyway).3
Just ponder that for a minute. It is a huge shift.
Bobbitt made a further point:
If the nation-state was characterized by the rule of law – and ... the society of nation-states attempted to impose something like the rule of law on international behaviour – the market-state is largely indifferent to the norms of justice, or for that matter to any particular set of moral values so long as law does not act as an impediment to economic competition.4
Hmm, don’t you think that might hint at a collapse of trust in capitalism? Then there’s Bobbitt’s punch line:
The market-state is, above all, a mechanism for enhancing opportunity, for creating something – possibilities – commensurate with our imaginations.5
As I understand it, the high-value knowledge work involved in “creating possibilities commensurate with our imaginations” was meant to provide rich opportunities for many of those in the West who had been left hanging out high and dry. However, much of that work naturally went to the areas where the manufacturing relocated.
Inciting Incident Element #3 … Breakdown of the Western Polity - Society - Business groupings.
Remorselessly, but quietly and inevitably, Elements #1 and #2 rode roughshod over the existing Western Nation-State structures.
The pre-digital world had held Polity, Society and Business together in a stable, mutually supportive manner so that each key element supported and benefited the others.
Initially unannounced to the general population, the battle between a Unipolar and a Multipolar world was underway.
If Elements #1, #2 and #3 cover geopolitical changes, the ensuing elements focus more directly on the changes forced by technology.
Inciting Incident Element #4 … everything pushed to Undifferentiated or Highly Differentiated
Digitalization provides solutions to many manufacturing challenges. And, aided by an ever-greater proliferation of apps, everybody is now able to access functional tools that assure ‘best practice’ from the get-go. This has caused a leveling of the playing field.
In pre-digital times, products and services were distributed across a broad quality range, but the consistency provided by digitalization meant that everything was pushed to the extremes of the differentiation range. Everything either Highly Differentiated or Wholly Undifferentiated.
This is where market pressure comes into play and, particularly in B2B activity, it is heavily inclined to push towards the Undifferentiated end of he scale. It’s the end where, of course, there are shark-infested waters with thin margins very real danger of commoditization.
Inciting Incident Element #5 … from Value Communication to Value Creation
Which is where we come back to Sales & Marketing. Subjected to the influence of Inciting Incident Elements #1-4 inclusive, Sales has been forced to change its purpose.
The traditional, pre-Digital, purpose of Sales was to communicate value. The new environment means that the sales process must now create value.
And it cannot effectively do that if it is not working harmoniously with Marketing - after all, Sales has responsibility for some of the Marketing within the Sales process.
Sales and Marketing must both move from Value Communication to Value Creation. And I do not believe that this is possible unless the two parties are together and working in lock-step.
It’s an interesting situation because those pesky customers now treat Sales & Marketing more like commodities, and have introduced new purchasing techniques to try to force concessions ... BUT, counter-intuitively, they are also demanding more expertise. Big opportunities!
We’ll address this topic in Part 2 of this series.
A final point …
Underpinning all of this, underpinning all of the digital technologies, including most recently the advent of AI, is the inexorable slide towards the extreme mechanization of functions and processes.
Expressed the other way round, that conclusion surely becomes … the extreme dehumanization of functions and processes.
I go back to the first line of the Jef Teugel’s piece with which I opened this post:
Somewhere between the rise of social media and the death of critical thinking, marketing ceased to be a discipline and became a department.
The problem is that all business functions have to a greater of lesser extent suffered this fate and Marketing is a particularly unfortunate victim. It’s all down to the surfeit of mechanization. We need to bring back some more human aspects. They may sometimes be flawed. But they hold out the prospect of insights and actions that go beyond ‘best practice’ to deliver ‘unique insight’.
More about this in the next installment.
Thanks for reading.
Photo at the top is from Shutterstock.
Philip Bobbitt. The Shield of Achilles : War, Peace and the Course of History (2002)
George and Weedon Grossmith. The Diary of a Nobody (1888/1889 in Punch and in book form in 1892)
Philip Bobbitt. Ibid.
Philip Bobbitt. Ibid.
Philip Bobbitt. Ibid.
David,
Teugels has articulated something that's been gnawing at many of us—that uncomfortable gap between what marketing *claims* to be and what it's actually *doing* in most organizations.
The "lowest barrier to entry, highest volume of opinion" observation particularly stings because it's so accurate. When everyone with a social media account considers themselves a marketer, and when "going viral" becomes the north star, we've confused **distribution** with **strategy** and **visibility** with **value**.
What strikes me most is the phrase "executive vanity production arm." It captures how marketing has been demoted from market-sensing strategic function to internal service department—existing primarily to make the C-suite feel good about themselves rather than to deeply understand and serve actual customers.
The question now: how do we restore marketing as a discipline? Is it about better education, different hiring criteria, boardroom courage, or all three?
Looking forward to Part 2.