Marketing is no longer just a department or an isolated activity. It’s a state of mind that needs to pervade the thoughts and actions of everyone in your organization, beginning with senior management.

Marketing is a powerful tool for gaining a competitive advantage, for differentiating your organization, for creating customers. And the ultimate goal of every activity in your organization, from finance, to sales, to production, should be to satisfy the needs and desires of your customers. This requires a collaborative effort; all areas need a more intimate, detailed, and systematic knowledge of marketing’s messages so they can carry through on brand promises. That’s why the responsibility for your company’s marketing and branding begins and ends with your entire management team.

Marketing initiates the business process

Although it’s important to manage all business functions, sound marketing must first be in place. It’s what drives business strategy. A great strategy without proper marketing will inevitably fail. Brand strategizing and marketing must move to the center of top management’s concerns. After all, marketing issues like research, customer retention, and product development are too important and interrelated with the rest of your organization to be the sole responsibility of a marketing department. 

Create internal buy-in and provide perspective

The CEO of any organization must fully acknowledge marketing’s importance before anyone else will adopt or respect it. Employees need to see that management considers marketing a significant and differentiated value to its organization. Marketing practices have limited power when they’re not supported by corporate culture. Specifically, the CEO must lead by example and actively demonstrate how important it is that the entire organization understands the market and meets customers’ needs.

In addition, marketing and branding efforts need the global perspective that CEO and top management involvement provides. Brand management may be the focal point of the marketing department, but it also deserves the long-term focus of the senior management team. This helps marketers stay connected to your operation’s many other functions and furthers their objectivity. Overall, the increased consideration of the customer through branding and marketing will benefit from all of management’s involvement.

It’s about the customer

While market share is a backward-looking metric, the marketing responsibility of measuring customer satisfaction instead calls for a forward view. If customer satisfaction begins to slip, market share erosion will soon follow. It’s important that you take a more proactive approach in this responsibility by being involved at the front end of maintaining customer values.

Your management should also act as a checkpoint to determine whether your marketing program has been designed and implemented with specific, customer-oriented objectives in mind. Although that sounds like a given in all marketing planning, it’s often overlooked.

Keeping everyone in the organization aware of marketing efforts to exceed customer expectations will help attract new customers and retain existing ones. And the payoffs are evident.

• New customer acquisition costs five to 10 times more than satisfying and retaining existing ones.
• The average company loses 10 percent to 30 percent of its customers every year.
• A 5 percent decrease in the customer deflection rate can increase profits 25 percent to 85 percent, depending on the industry.
• The customer profitability rate tends to increase over the life of the retained customer.

Unlike other functional areas such as operations, accounting, and manufacturing, marketing is 100 percent externally focused. Taking the lead to direct everyone’s attention to marketing forces needed attention outside your organization’s day-to-day issues, and on the entire purpose of its existence: your customers.