Marketing in Practice

ADS Marketing in Practice
Marketing Balance
Companies must always move forward, innovating products and services, staying in touch with customer needs, and seeking new advantages rather than relying on past strengths. India’s Hindustan Unilever asks all staff members not just marketers to obtain a “consumer license” to work on its brands, which requires spending 50 hours of face time with shoppers. As one senior executive noted, “Our consumers are moving faster than marketers do; whether in terms of rural or urban changes or the way they consume media and entertainment.

Moving forward especially means incorporating the Internet and digital efforts into marketing plans. Marketers must balance increased spending on search advertising, social media, e-mails, and text messages with appropriate spending on traditional marketing communications. But they must do so in tough economic times, when accountability has become a top priority and returns on investment are expected from every marketing activity. The ideal is retaining winning practices from the past while adding fresh approaches that reflect the new marketing realities.

Marketing Accountability
Marketers are increasingly asked to justify their investments in financial and profitability terms, as well as in terms of building the brand and growing the customer base. Organizations recognize that much of their market value comes from intangible assets, particularly brands, customer base, employees,
distributor and supplier relations, and intellectual capital. They are thus applying more metrics—brand equity, customer lifetime value, return on marketing investment (ROMI)—to understand and measure their marketing and business performance and a broader variety of financial measures to assess the direct and indirect value their marketing efforts create

Marketing in the Organization
As the late David Packard of Hewlett-Packard observed, “Marketing is far too important to leave to the marketing department.” Increasingly, marketing is not done only by the marketing department; every employee has an impact on the customer. Marketers now must properly manage all possible touch points: store layouts, package designs, product functions, employee training, and shipping and logistics. To create a strong marketing organization, marketers must think like executives in other departments, and executives in other departments must think more like marketers. Interdepartmental teamwork that includes marketers is needed to manage key processes like production innovation, new- business development, customer acquisition and retention, and order fulfillment ADS