ACADEMIA STRIKES AGAIN – AND MISSES

            Calm down. Don’t panic – which you would clearly be entitled to do if the report on the study that supposedly (according to Advertising Age) raps Chief Marketing officers for having zero impact on sales frightens you.

            First, it just isn’t true. At least, in the legal and accounting professions, and probably elsewhere as well.  Never mind the academic conclusions of an obviously flawed study, the pragmatic experience that so many of us in professional services marketing (including me) have had shows that what we do works. Our programs do produce clients. And produce many other benefits as well.

            Second, I’d sooner trust the three-card Monte dealer than the marketing academic. With obvious exceptions, they are astigmatic observers of processes they rarely understand, except on an abstract theoretical level). And again, with exceptions, they have rarely had bottom line responsibility.  I once taught a course in professional services marketing in a major graduate business school. If memory serves me well, I was the only marketing faculty member who had ever worked in marketing for a company, and who had had bottom line responsibility. I was appalled at the chasm between their theoretical knowledge of the realities of marketing, and the practical aspects of it..  I’ve subsequently been appalled at the ignorance of marketing reality of many of the most prominent of the marketing academics, who speak from theory, not experience.  Just as appalling is the fact that many of them are retained by law and accounting firms as consultants. The blind leading the naive.  With no long held traditions of marketing by professionals, marketing knowledge isn’t always ingrained in the minds of even the best lawyers and accountants. Some very famous names in academic marketing are still using tired old clichés like the four “p’s”. In a parallel situation in Silicon Valley, my son Jonathan, who works for a major Silicon Valley company, described it by asking me, “If you had to hire a nuclear physicist, and ten resumes came across your desk, how would you know who to choose?”

            Third, this study, according to the report in Advertising Age, is so full of holes, so flawed, as to be useless. On top of which it’s based on manufacturing companies,  many of which suffered from such factors as missing market trends, or making poor quality products, or competition.  Marketing has worked magic, but doesn’t always work. For thousands of years civilization has felt the need for a hangman, but nobody has yet found a way to make the hangman loveable. If General Motors makes a poor quality car, in a passé styling, you can’t blame marketing if we buy Toyotas instead.  (True, marketing’s role is to understand the market, but if the company leaders don’t listen, you can’t blame the marketers – and that’s true in the professions as well.) There are so many more complex factors that affect sales and profitability than marketing that a study that seems designed more for the professors’ publish-or-perish protection than for genuine enlightenment is trash.

            And, reports Ad Age, the professors “…admit the study is limited because it focuses on financial-performance metrics, such as sales growth and profitability, and not on brand equity, and both [authors] were quick to offer caveats to the conclusion.”   That, it seems to me, is pretty slim reason to cavalierly distort the sometimes fragile relationship between marketers and the professionals we serve.

            What does this study mean to law and accounting firm marketers? Not a heck of a lot. I haven’t seen the full report yet, but the Ad Age coverage is pretty comprehensive. My judgment is that the study was superficial, didn’t consider such factors as the role of marketing in not only direct sales, but in those factors that contribute to sales (such as product or service improvement),  or indicate any understanding of the significant difference between marketing a product and marketing a professional service. This last seems to elude the academic world (see my dialogue with Professor Philip Kotler in The Marcus Report).

            And so marketers, and so managing partners, don’t panic. In the immortal words of Candide, having listened for so long to Professor Pangloss, “Come, let us cultivate our garden.”