Martin Glenn, chief executive of United Biscuits, and former Pepsico
marketer, has argued that marketing is crucial to business success, at
an event hosted by agency intermediary Oystercatchers.
Glenn said: “My main contention is that at the heart all business
failures are actually marketing failures. Marketing is really a
philosophy and there’s a lot of good companies that are really good at
marketing but don’t have a marketing department.
“They have an external orientation so they look at what’s going on
outside and force themselves to ask uncomfortable questions about what
external trends they need in their business.”
Marketers have the skills to lead a company “if marketing strategy is put at the heart of what they (marketers) do,” he said.
Also speaking at the event was David Wheldon, head of brand,
reputation and citizenship at Barclays Group, who joined the bank at the
start of 2012.
He offered an insight into how the crisis of trust that hit Barclays
in the wake of revelations its traders had manipulated interest rates
made it imperative to restate its values.
He said: “What’s made it really rather straightforward is the crisis
that Barclays found itself in because when your trust collapses
instantaneously we say ‘what do we do now?’
“We looked at what we stand for, our purpose and our values. We set
our values from the inside out so that’s taken patience and resilience.
It probably took the crisis to make it doable so I was hired to do a
thing that I’m not sure whether it would have been doable without the
crisis.”
Wheldon also encouraged marketers to be ruthless in asking questions
about what the company wants from marketing and from the marketing role.
He said: “One of the mistakes I’ve made in the past is to not ask
enough about what it is you want me to do and what is it that you want
of marketing and what is it that you want of this role.
“If you know what that mandate is and you play that mandate things aren’t as difficult as they appear to be.”
Debbie Klein, chief executive at Engine Group, said that there had
never been a better time for an agency to partner with a client,
explaining that “digital disruption” had meant that many companies were
having to reassess their business models.
- Blogger Comment
- Facebook Comment
Subscribe to:
Post Comments
(
Atom
)
0 comments:
Post a Comment