Marketing is not a corporate rotation

The thing about experience is that it is far from linear--in fact, the only thing linear about it is time, and then only if you're graphing it. There's broad experience and there's deep experience, and the more you get of each, the stronger your overall capability becomes--as long as you learn from both your successes and your failures.


I've spent my entire career in marketing and sales, and I love it. The thing about marketing is that every life experience you've ever had provides you with something you can bring to your work, because it's really just about what makes people tick: what turns them on, what turns them off. Think about the last time you shopped at the grocery store. Retailers have been doing endcap promotions since before I was born. Why? Because they've figured out that by featuring a product in such a spotlight location, more shoppers will buy more units of whatever it is--whether or not it's at a discounted price, and there's plenty of data that backs it up!


Anyone who's ever bought anything or seen an advertisement has some marketing opinion. However, there is both an art and a science to marketing that you simply can't gain by being a consumer, or studying it, or reading about it. So why, then, do many major corporations continue to regard marketing as a shared service, an operational enhancement, or a corporate rotation for developing executives? I think that mutual understanding is a great thing, and cross-functional exposure benefits the whole organization.


I have the capacity to do reasonably complex arithmetic in my head, and the aptitude to envision most food manufacturing and packaging processes. However, that plus an MBA don't qualify me to be a controller or an operations director, and few companies would even dream of hiring me for such a role. I've seen too many times where the organization rotates someone into marketing leadership who is less experienced and skilled than even the junior marketing staff, and it inevitably leads to less than best-in-class marketing as well as drained team morale.


Marketing involves knowing your consumer and your distribution channel, and thus is closely tied to corporate strategy. It must be core to a corporation's culture, and the key driver of planning and business models. As we emerge from this global recession, I believe we will find that the companies that recover quickest and strongest, are those that invested in marketing even during these tough times--in consumer insights, product development, integrated communications and the People that know how do guide them and leverage the results.