The Role of Marketing in Business

What causes success in the long run

What causes success in the long run, by which we mean a continuous growth in earnings per share and in the capital value of the shares, has been shown by research3,4 to depend on four elements.

An excellent core product or service and all the associated R&D, which closely matches the wants of the organization’s target segments. Clearly, marketing will have a heavy input into this process. All this is showing is that companies with average products deserve average success.

world class, state-of-the-art product and service operations

Excellent, world class, state-of-the-art product and service operations. All this is saying is that inefficiency today is likely to be punished. Marketing should, of course, have an input to defining operational efficiency in customer satisfaction terms. Where it is not allowed to, because of corporate culture, quality often becomes a sterile token.

A culture that encourages and produces an infrastructure within which employees can be creative and entrepreneurial within the prescribed company procedures. Bored and boring people, for whom subservience and compliance is the norm, cause average or below-average performance. This is particularly important because it is the organization’s people who deliver value to customers.

Professional marketing departments

Professional marketing departments, staffed by qualified professionals (not failures from other functions). All this means is that companies who recruit professionally qualified marketers with appropriate experience have a far greater chance of success than those whose marketing departments are staffed by just about anybody who fancies themselves as marketers.