There is lots of evidence today of corporations displaying a kind of comprehensive corporate memory loss. It's the CMO's job to ensure that there is a robust marketing memory so that fresh ideas are framed in accumulated experience and learning.
It may seem counter intuitive to think of a corporation having a memory. But really, that's what concepts like best practices and process engineering are all about. A corporation builds up experience in the most effective ways to achieve its goals and, through trial and error, discards the ineffective and preserves and improves what is effective.
There were a number of ways in which this experience was preserved in memory. One was capturing the best practice in some kind of documented process or procedure. A second source of memory was formal training. Corporations routinely scheduled their new hires for formal training to inculcate the corporate memory for knowledge and processes, and there were additional training courses at key points along the career path, following promotions or transfers.
However, research we recently conducted among the Fortune 500 indicates that marketing training is rapidly disappearing from the corporate curriculum, primarily because it is deemed too expensive.
The third locus of corporate memory used to be expert staff groups. Operating executives, such as brand managers, could call upon these expert staff groups for specific expertise which was deployed horizontally across the business -- how to develop effective advertising, conduct research design and run the best promotions, spend trade dollars, and so on.
Nowadays, however, corporations tend to eschew these expert staff groups, regarding them as cost and overhead. When the answer to the question, "How do I do this right?" is "Call Fred," it is too often the case today that Fred is not answering his phone because he's not there any more. (He may be available as an expensive consultant at 10 times the hourly rate that he used to get as a salary!)
No procedures book. No training. No expert staff groups. No memory. The consequence is marketing by zero- to two-year-olds.
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No procedures book. No training. No expert staff groups. No memory. The consequence is marketing by zero- to two-year-olds (since on average marketers spend less than two years in each assignment and have to rediscover fire every time they parachute in to a new assignment).
This is exactly the kind of problem that the CMO as Marketer-Technologist, whom we introduced in last month's CMO Memo, can solve. The astute CMO, realizing that there are no more procedures books, training curricula or expert staff groups can replace them all and improve on their combined contribution with what is being termed today a Marketing Knowledge Center.
As a marketer, the CMO can pull together and document the processes and best practices that define, in their company, "how we do marketing around here." Every company has ways of developing communications, managing channels, planning annual promotion schedules and trade shows and events. Every company has beliefs about what its brands stand for and how the brand architecture, brand essence or brand meaning is created and maintained. Every company has ways of developing strategy and measuring performance.
The CMO can pull all this knowledge together in a grand definition of marketing. If there are holes in it, they can be filled from external sources, whether those be academia, consultants or literature.
You don't have to boil the ocean on the first day, either. Start with packaging, or promotion, or brand building. Capture that process, and then move on to capture another one. Pretty soon, you'll have an end-to-end marketing system. What used to be available in the procedures book is now assembled. That's the marketing part. But it's not useful until it can be shared and used.
The technology part is to make this knowledge available to all practitioners and partners, inside and outside the company, and get everyone to follow the processes, and by doing so, improve them. The technology today is easily available and doesn't cost an arm and a leg. Storage and access to every form of data -- whether a TV ad, radio ad, package design, research report or sales plan -- is simple, and with web services, it can be available anywhere, any time.
The Knowledge Center replaces three cost centers with one investment that can pay itself out quickly.
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Project management workflow, analysis tools, research tools -- all of these and more are available on the desktop for use over the Internet, intranet or extranet. Security and safety are pretty much solved problems. As with the marketing process capture, CMOs can start small and build their marketing Knowledge Centers progressively, demonstrating improved performance with every added module.
The shared knowledge replaces expert staff groups and training. Instead of Fred traveling around the world lecturing on best practices, marketing practitioners can now get their knowledge from the Knowledge Center, apply it with the help of expert marketing tools, learn from the application and save the results to build up a memory of what works and what doesn't.
The Knowledge Center replaces three cost centers with one investment that can pay itself out quickly, and improves effectiveness (everyone works at best practice levels) and efficiency (lower costs, faster times to market via the use of expert tools). Just another day's work for the marketer-technologist CMO.
Hunter Hastings is managing partner of EMM Consulting Group, which advises companies on how to implement Enterprise Marketing Management, a multi-faceted system for global brand management combining marketing knowledge, best practice processes and training with collaborative software, marketing tools and infrastructure. He can be reached at HunterHastings@EMMConsulting.net
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