Effective marketing influences every aspect of your business, not just communication or awareness. However, this is not a command relationship — as in, “We the marketing gods declare the focus group shows we must deliver X.” Marketing tyranny ends with the communication of compelling, yet undeliverable promises that damage brand equity.
To avoid tyranny (and its opposite – weeniedom), marketing must act as the gas to energize your company’s efforts to build competitive advantage. From the marketers viewpoint, this energizing creative environment is driven by three initiatives:
- Drive Interconnected Measurement: As corporate objectives are broken down into department and individual objectives they are reinterpreted within the confines of a given process. Usually this means that across interdependent departments it is difficult to match goal to goal, creating difficulties in communication and support.
- Facilitate Meaningful Dialog: Communication is no longer a push vehicle driven by traditional collateral, advertising and PR. Marketing must facilitate clear, consistent, meaningful dialog between all levels of your organization and your market.
- Establish Strategies For Competitive Advantage: Marketing is often asked to translate a product attribute into a meaningful communication point. This needs to be a two-way street. Establish clear strategies that pressure all corporate processes to meet, exceed and reinforce your brand image and promise.
Each of these initiatives requires a closer relationship between marketing professionals and other departments within your organization. With coordinated effort these initiatives revitalize competitive thinking — helping drive communications, as well as your product and process development, towards distinct competitive advantage.