Marketing costs money and next to the product manager's expense account, the biggest bolus of bucks is going to be charged back to communications. This causes lots of people to periodically wonder if MarCom is really "worth it" but since great communications has thus far aptly defied real measurement, no one arrives at a satisfactory answer. Most executive choose to live with MarCom but it is an uneasy alliance, because the execs think that they are somehow being robbed or, worse yet, laughed at, by the unusual characters who actually do MarCom work.
This results in cheeseburger marketing.
The reason I call it cheeseburger marketing is that, like cheeseburgers themselves, cheeseburger marketing is fun, tasty, filling, and absolutely no good for you. After not much time, cheeseburgers make you fat and sick.
Here is how to tell if you're doing cheeseburger MarCom:
1. Creative choices as to formats, colors, media, images, photography are driven by personal choices and individual opinions rather than real reasoning. This puts personal taste ahead of what makes sense for your message.
2. Messaging is egocentric. You can tell you're egocentric when you want the first line of your brochure (about a product) to be the company's mission statement. You can tell you're egocentric when every line of the brochure starts out, "We at the Acme Anvil Company …." You can tell you're egocentric when nothing in the brochure has any emotional impact on the target reader.
3. Decisions in MarCom are made whimsically, haphazardly, more with an eye to what is fun than what is useful.
4. Nobody plans. MarCom has no crisis plan, no PR plan, no strategic plan, no publication plan. Add to this no archiving of documents, no formalized procedures.
5. Nobody measures. Now this is an area where I have a lot of opinions, because some types of marketing are very easy to measure, some types are almost impossible to measure, and a lot falls in-between. So even an expert team really can never measure MarCom results to the degree that they should be measured. Everybody falls short. But in a cheeseburger MarCom department, nobody even tries to measure. This means that successes get overlooked and failures get repeated.
6. MarCom projects are based on what feels right or seems like fun, rather than what works at selling product or even what the field wants and uses.
7. Vendors are selected by who takes the staff to the best lunches and hands out the most wonderful holiday gifts. Vendors who provide good service are ignored in favor of those who come bearing gifts.
8. MarCom staff remain vigil in their quest to be uneducated about their company, their products, their technologies, and new media. Not knowing things is regarded as a badge of honor; people who understand the company's products are considered to be hapless geeks and best shunned.
9. MarCom isolates itself from other departments. MarCom players do not know other departments or issues in the company. Most MarCom members spend their time sharpening their sarcasm skills rather than their people skills.
All of these traits compare to people who would rather sit around and eat cheeseburgers and fries instead of eating healthful food and exercising. It's the mindset that favors fun and excess over discipline and health.
If you have a flabby MarCom team, you may also have a flabby Marketing team. The keys to good health follow:
1. Develop a solid understanding of what your company does, what it sells, and who else sells similar stuff.
2. Get to know your customers and your field personnel. Spend an hour or so and listen to their stories. Process this information to the point that you know what keeps your customers awake at night. (That's crucial to good marketing … knowing hot buttons.)
3. Insist that MarCom people stay up to date with new technology in their field, including social media, Internet, electronic documents and so on.
4. Make MarCom people interact with lots of other people, including scary people like engineers and software guys and gals. If your MarCom people refuse this or are panicked, you have a bunch of cheeseburgers.
5. Measure, measure, measure. Even if you do it wrong, even if your results are dubious, even if you don't know what you're doing, keep trying and keep counting.
6. Take corrective actions. Measure so you know what doesn't work and stop doing it. Measure so you know what does work: do that more.
7. Weed out the culture of "I like green." Train everyone you can that personal preferences and tastes do not matter in the creation of marketing materials. You do what the customer wants, which you determine by what works. See #6. Create a world where it is possible for a marketing director to HATE the color orange but use it effectively in marketing materials.
8. Force MarCom people to think through different areas–to look at competitive ads or review websites from other companies. Encourage them to build "swipe files," cool stuff they have seen in other uses that might be re-purposed for your marketingt.
9. Don't allow MarCom to be the idiot department. Most execs tend to regard MarCom people as dispensable clowns who can draw pictures and make up stuff. That's not because executives are dumb, it is because MarCom does not do its own branding and upgrade its image. Let MarCom market itself.
You see cheeseburger marketing in medicine every single day–egocentric messages, pretty but meaningless pictures, and badly designed pieces that cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars because teams of non-designers met for endless hours deciding on such crucial issues as line weight and fonts.
Even good companies can have cheeseburger marketing. So put down the cholesterol-heavy, artery-clogging fun foods and go grab an salad and hit the gym. You need to show discipline, courage, intelligence, and a lot of savvy … in your MarCom efforts. You wouldn't have much respect for a person who ate cheeseburgers all the time, talked only about himself and his pleasures, and became a big, fat slob. Your customers won't like MarCom efforts from a self-indulgent, self-referential, and self-pleasing bunch of marketers.
