The Marketing Manager's Yearbook 2008
Foreword
David Thorp
Director of Research and Information, The Chartered Institute of Marketing
Peter Drucker said there are only two business drivers: innovation and marketing. Everything else is cost.
Today, Drucker’s view is truer than ever. Businesses are competing for smaller slices of customer share.
Technology gives the customer far greater choice than they had even five years ago, and the individual
company is able to exercise less control over that choice.
The value of marketing is that it gives effective differentiators to companies, in a world saturated by choice. By
thinking and operating from the customer’s point of view, marketing helps companies make the choices that
are most likely to gain the customer’s interest and support, and foster returning business.
Converging technologies mean that the role of marketing is changing, as the balance of power shifts from
company to customer. No longer are customers passive recipients of marketing messages, and no longer
do they need to make decisions based on a company’s convenience or lack of competition. The internet,
the ‘on-demand’ nature of services and the customer’s huge array of choice, means that marketers need to
discover new ways to find and retain customer loyalty. Compounding this is the rise in social networking and
blogs. When customers are unhappy with a brand, a service they’ve received or an individual company, they
can be much more vocal about it and can quickly let large numbers of people know their dissatisfaction.
Yet the paradox of technology is that while it appears to be making business less human, the perceptive
company can use the new technology to create more personal relationships with customers, and there
are three reasons why. Firstly, the technology means a company can automate a lot more of the tasks that
once had to be done by humans leaving staff free to spend more time offering a personal service to those
customers who need it. Secondly the technology enables greater knowledge of customers and markets.
By using it intelligently to turn data into information, companies can find out much more about a customer’s
needs and wants, to enable them – whilst being transparent about how the customer data is being used – to
offer a more personalised service. Thirdly, discussions between customers on social networking sites offer
a new channel of market research for companies to utilise. The customer ‘trialogue’ that social networking
creates offers companies genuine insights into what customers think and feel, rather than opinions given in
questionnaires or focus groups.
Since the last edition of The Marketing Manager’s Yearbook, customer awareness of green issues has made
unprecedented advances. Knowledge of – and concern about issues such as ‘food miles’ and ethical trading
is increasing. Rising interest in local produce and concern over personal carbon footprints are impacting on
B2C marketing in all sectors, and this looks set to intensify in the future.
There’s great opportunity for marketers to be at the forefront of the customer’s interest in the green agenda
because, it’s the marketer who’s closest to the customer. The responsible marketer understands the value of
The Triple Bottom Line (TBL) and is best placed to know how the customer thinks, and therefore should be
the ‘champion of sustainability’ in any organisation.
Milton Friedman’s famous ‘the business of business is business’ maxim is often used as a reason for
companies to concentrate on profit, and let governments worry about saving the planet. But profit comes
from growth, and growth comes from balancing profits with the desires of customers. Customers want the
brands they buy to meet their own ethical standards; so it is ‘the business of business’ to be concerned, as
part of an overarching strategy, with sustainable issues.
- Yet how can companies commit to sustainable behaviour, whilst remaining profitable and not losing business
to less scrupulous competitors? The Chartered Institute of Marketing believes that following TBL principles can
- enable companies to operate with environmental and social concerns in mind, but without foregoing a sound
economic bottom line. It’s also a powerful tool against accusations of green wash. The TBL approach creates
an ethical backbone that runs throughout the company to meet its responsibilities to combating climate
change, rather than being merely an add-on to generate extra business from the interested customer.
- The UK government is one of the first to fully appreciate the value of marketing for the public sector. There are
great opportunities opening up for those in the marketing profession to take their skills to the NHS, to local
councils and to governmental bodies. Social marketing, for example, is an area that is currently experiencing
considerable growth, as agencies and trusts recognise the value of using marketing techniques to create
positive messages, to make campaigns resonate more effectively with people than has sometimes been the
case in the past.
We at The Chartered Institute of Marketing, want to assist serious marketers wherever possible when
choosing these areas of work and in contributing their skills to organisations, not only to primarily create profit,
but generate value for society. To facilitate this, the Institute now offers several courses in these fields.