WHERE WE STAND

Marketing is hugely wasteful and inefficient.

In my first ten years of operational marketing I learnt that marketing departments rarely practised marketing. What they mostly focused on then, and increasingly do today, is Promotion.

For the next ten years I worked in strategic roles where I discovered that while senior managers expected marketers to position products as part of their promotional remit, other departments sorted out all the other elements of the marketing mix. This is not a recipe for success. An effective positioning needs planning well before the marketing team gets involved and should direct the entire strategy not just promotion.

I realised poorly positioned products are dependent on much larger promotional resources to stimulate and maintain market interest. They are much more vulnerable to competitors and struggle to grow as fast or as cost effectively as better positioned products. Many simply fail.

What a waste. Not just of money but time spent on ultimately futile endeavours. And these days, there's not only the human cost. Your customers increasingly care about the social and environmental effects too.