The ANA has just released its 2009 State of Marketing report, subtitled “The Shift” in deference to Prophet’s sponsorship of the survey and the release of their senior partner’s book “The Shift: The Transformation of Today’s Marketers into Tomorrow’s Growth Leaders.”
The survey report serves as the basis for reiterating the key points from Scott Davis’s book, specifically the five dimensions of the transformation that marketers need to make in order to make the move from “being merely a sales enabler to being a value driver across the enterprise” – or, as the book terms it, to becoming a Visionary marketer.
The language may be a bit self aggrandizing but the ideas are good, specifically the core idea about how the influence of marketers is in direct proportion to their contribution to driving the growth agenda of the business. In finance theory, the value of a business is driven by three things – profit, growth and risk. Scott Davis is right to get marketers to up their game from just a focus on marketing efficiency (that primarily sees marketing’s contribution in terms of margins and therefore profit) to one that focuses on growth.
This change of mindset is probably the single biggest thing that marketers can do to elevate their impact from the tactical to the strategic.
One critical component for doing so is for marketers to gain a deeper understanding for how the business actually works - my favorite data from the survey was the contrast of the level of cross-functional collaboration by “visionary marketers” vs. their visually-challenged peers. 60% of the visionaries claimed to collaborate closely with finance and 39% with operations vs. figures of 26% and 9% for their myopic peers.
PS The five dimensions on which marketers need to “shift” are:
- From creating marketing strategy to driving business impact
- From controlling your message to galvanizing your network
- From incremental improvements to pervasive innovation
- From managing marketing investments to inspiring marketing excellence
- From an operational focus to a relentless customer focus
