Missed Opportunities

I finally bought a new car. After 11 years of driving my pick-up truck, it was finally time to admit it was time. I had decided on a Pontiac Solstice but had delayed purchase since all the dealers in my area wanted $5K over sticker price for the car, and I just didn’t want it that badly.

 

Fortunately, I met a terrific Pontiac dealer in Detroit during one of my presentations and he told me that selling cars over sticker price just pissed people off, so he did not do that. He also told me he could order the car for me and have it delivered to my local dealer for pick up. 

Sounded great and the local dealer agreed to a usual and customary courtesy delivery fee for their part in the prep and delivery of the vehicle and the opportunity to create a new service department customer. The Detroit dealer did a wonderful job for me and the paperwork process was a pleasure. They stayed in touch with me to let me know when the car would be finished at the factory and on its way. They also coordinated everything with my local dealer for me. 

When I picked the car up, the process was quick and easy and most of the time was spent by the sales manager telling me that I did not need to buy the car from a dealer in Detroit that they would have sold it to me without the $5K mark-up over sticker too. I pointed out that they chose not to do that several months ago, which was how I ended up ordering from the Detroit dealer to begin with. He grudgingly acknowledged that a few months ago, that might have been true. 

Anyway, he removed the window sticker and gave me the keys. I asked him to remove another sticker in the window which he did and posted the operating permit in the front window. I signed the Motor Vehicle Department paperwork and was on my way.  

As I was driving the car home, I noticed that it was a bit difficult to see through the dirty front window and the car did not have the typical new car shine because it was covered with a film of dust. 

No worries, my son is happy to earn some money washing my new car and I now know this dealer is not about quality service, so I will go elsewhere with my service business. 

They did get their modest delivery fee, but they not only did not earn a new customer, they created what JD Powers calls an Assassin. As you can see by this blog post.

Mitch

Ed Zander steps down at Motorola due to failed Marketing

But how can that be true you say, the Razr ads are cool. The brand is well known. How did failed Marketing cause Mr. Zander’s (don’t know him, so Ed seems a little presumptuous) need to step down? 

If you have been reading this blog for a while, or if you have read our book, Value Acceleration, you know that Ralph and I (and all of the members of Customer Manufacturing Group), believe that the marketing tactics most people see and believe to be the primary role of Marketing, are simply the back-end of Marketing. And while important, it’s the front-end of Marketing that will kill you if you don’t get it right. All the money in the world spent on the promotion of products and services nobody wants is a losing proposition. 

With all of this in mind, I was amused (I’m sure Mr. Zander was not) that Business Week, in their December 17, 2007 issue noted that Ed Zander “… hung up his job…” because he failed “… to intuit what the market wanted next ….” 

In a company Motorola’s size, it’s hard to believe that Ed Zander should be personally responsible for “intuiting what the market wants next,” but he should have had people working in Marketing that could do that. However, given that Mr. Zander spent time with Scott McNealy at Sun who once told me that Sun was “… not going to waste money on marketing pukes” maybe Mr. Zander missed the critical role of Marketing in a company’s success.

Mitch

Listen to our radio interview … free

Ralph and Mitch were recently interviewed on a business radio program on their views of the current trends and pressures on marketing and sales people and processes. You can listen to this mp3 file by using this link:

http://audioam.blogtalkradio.com/show_116650.mp3

A bit more on CMO turnover

The business week article that Ralph mentioned in the previous post also noted a “fatal” flaw in the role of marketing in most companies. If you read the article (can’t find it on the BW website to link to, sorry), you’ll notice that the apparent definition of marketing (which is vague in all cases, as Ralph noted in his post) is limited to the “back-end” of marketing. That is, the so-called promotion and sales support aspects.

 If marketing is not also responsible for strategy, product/service offering identification, market targeting, etc., then the job of promoting poorly selected and defined products and services is bound to end up as a “scape goat” position. Until and unless marketing is viewed as a true business process that is tasked with the alignment of the company’s capabilities with customer needs, wants, and demands, the CMO will have a short tenure … or position elimination.

Mitch

CMO instability due to lack of process management

The current issue of Business Week has an extensive article on the short tenure of CMOs.  It seems that they have a shorter life than any other position in the C-suite. 

This really isn’t very surprising to us.  After all, few people define “marketing” correctly, in our opinion, and as the article so well documents, few CEOs can define the role of the CMO well.

It’s impossible to define a management role for a function that’s not well defined, and we believe that that’s the root cause of the issue.  As we detail in the book, defining marketing (as a process) is the first step to managing it.  Which is why we propose our process-based model of marketing, the Customer Manufacturing System.

One of the blowbacks from this confusion is that there’s a movement afoot to do away with the CMO role and go back to dividing up marketing responsibility among the sales VP, CIO, COO and CFO.  We think that this is precisely the wrong thing to do; why go back to something that wasn’t working to begin with?  Further, marketing is a process, and like all essential processes, it cuts across the old functional lines.  Like all essential processes, it too should be managed by a process owner: the CMO.

The real issue is to define marketing properly by a correct process model.

Ralph