In our Management of Change series, we have focused on a variety of perspectives including executive, financial and project management. This week, we will take a look at change from the perspective of the marketing professional. In most companies, marketing plays multiple roles: it is 1) the external research department, 2) the positioner/communicator of key public messaging and 3) the business driver with the executive team.
What’s in it for me?
Each of these roles has its own perspective on change. Let’s look at each of these “hats” worn by marketing and explore “what’s in it” for each of them.
- First, the external researcher. An important aspect of marketing’s job is to constantly keep abreast of the industry and the economy. To do that, we are on a continual research and analysis quest with particular focus on the external factors that may (or may not) impact our business. As the economic detective, we are often the first to uncover the clues to market change.
- Second, the positioner/communicator. Once marketing has discovered even the tiniest seeds of change, our job is to react: by trumpeting the change internally with the rest of the executive team and then by responding to the change through market communications to customers, i.e. “market positioning.”
- Once we’ve unearthed change, we must work internally with the executive team to first determine that business changes are needed within the organization. We then work to carefully construct communications to help everyone understand what’s happening in the company and the impact of the change on their work – keeping things positive and accurate.
- In positioning, marketers must put themselves into the very heads of their customers, both current and prospective, as well as competitors and industry analysts. Marketing must know what’s important to each and communicate accordingly – through social media, through articles/papers, through presentations, and a variety of other mechanisms. These external communications help demonstrate that the company is well-informed and well-equipped to handle a changing environment while still providing value to customers.
- Third, the executive team participant. As we’ve mentioned, we in marketing, usually in support of the executive team, are always researching the industry landscape in our quest to forecast the business’s future and position our company accordingly. And when we determine that changes must be made, marketing’s job is to act as the jealous guardian for our customers (both current and future) and their company’s position in the industry.
The article, “10 Principles of Change Management” describes some of marketing’s role in internal change.
Too often, change leaders make the mistake of believing that others understand the issues, feel the need to change, and see the new direction as clearly as they do. The best change programs reinforce core messages through regular, timely advice that is both inspirational and practicable. Communications flow … from the bottom and … from the top, and are targeted to provide employees the right information at the right time and to solicit their input and feedback. Often this will require overcommunication through multiple, redundant channels.
The change within
There’s more. While marketing is a front-runner to internal changes, we must also be prepared to change our own processes, especially our technology. Forbes.com calls this concept “Adaptive Marketing,” which is “a new approach marketers must take to survive the significant changes put in front of us. The premise was and is that marketing will change rapidly and radically, caused by the technologies now at marketers’ and their customers’ disposal.” The piece goes on to describe that the “ability to implement process changes and calculate careful organizational impacts will differentiate those CMOs that say they want to change from those that know how to make change happen. As any other functional executive who has been through change management would tell marketers, technology does not solve bad processes, it just makes the problem more obvious.”
In Summary
The Management of Change is a significant reality in the lifecycle of any company. But with the help of the marketing team’s efforts to:
1) Constantly research and discover external impact that will require responsive change
2) Champion change within the executive team and communicate change within the rest of the organization
3) Clearly position change back into the industry and to customers
4) Manage company change within marketing itself,
the company’s adaptation to new external realities and subsequent adoption of new market positions can reap many rewards. When a company demonstrates that it is on top of this constant cycle, the engendered confidence from its customer base will grow exponentially.