Marketing in the Boardroom

over the recent year-end break, I caught up with a few articles I had set aside from journals I respect for their thought leadership.One topic got an overdose of exposure during the brief period covered by thesetearsheets. In different ways, with different (but evocative) headlines, the concern for the absence of marketing backgrounded people in Boardrooms was trumpeted by UK, USA and local writers and editors.Interviews with a variety of senior business people, with and without marketing careers, gave the articles a sense of tension and urgency for action, as if this observationwas something new and devastating.Views ranged from ‘a fundamental issue of attracting the wrong kind of people intomarketing’ to some sort of blame game from the dot.com rocket race, to the need for people or Boards ‘with a holistic understanding of P&L and financial literacy’, through to a characterisation of marketing executives as ‘promoters, advertising and PR people’, not the genuine boardroom article.Other ‘causes’ ranged from the itinerant nature of marketing people (‘need a new brand to play with’), to their obsession with the ‘toys’ of marketing communications, and the seduction of allegedly newmethodologies. All of this alongside a reputation for an addiction to jargon, assumed to be a defense against the shallowness of their roles, gave the net of these writings a sense of despair.Given the wave of stories on this topic, you wonder whether much of it is a knock-on effect of the ‘issue of the month’ faddism exacerbated by the global on-line feeding of editors and their writers.Our observation is that there is some substance in all of this, but that it is far from a recent phenomenon.At the same time we suspect that the homework on the reality of the topic is a little underdone and that there are several significant CEO’s and board members with marketing roles in their background.Putting that aside, the sad truth is that all of the reasons covered by the quoted comments have supportiveevidence. From our continuing business involvement experience, we note that there is an unfortunateshortage of rounded marketing people across the local corporate scene. Whether this is due to an inappropriate or under-resourced educational system, or poor employment selection practices, or inadequatemanagement in early career stages, or an ill-informed or unbalanced understanding of the marketing role, is open to debate.No doubt, the broader Australian business problem of an obsession with process over quality of thinking makes its mark in the marketing community. As does the appetite for data, without the taste for real, results focussedinsights.But if we take a deep breath and reassess the truth about marketing as a whole of business imperative, it might lead to a different set of conclusions.We would see the need for all CEO’s and Board members to, at the very least, understand the role of marketing and its influence on the success of their business. In turn this would lead to a requirement for all CEO’s and Board Members tohave the same level of marketing literacy (and within that, the critical role of their brand/s) as they demand for theirfinancial literacy.And as a result of that, marketing people may see the need for more articulate and confident advocacy for their contribution, by their behaviour and self-disciplined measurement, to create a higher and wider level of marketing understanding andperformance. This may then be the precursor to marketing-wise Boards, irrespective of the backgrounds of their members

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