Number of words: 481
The marketeers have not only pushed production men into the cold – they have ousted the salesman. The standard sneer against ‘non-marketing-orientated’ companies is that they have merely called the sales manager a marketing manager. This is more sensible than importing a dear and dearly educated marketing manager and downgrading the little matter of selling. Just as you cannot market any- thing you cannot make, so you cannot market a produce you cannot sell.
Selling, like production, is one of the grubbier aspects of management – instead of hitting machines that break down, you come up against people who say ‘no’, or ‘maybe”. The great marketing companies were all founded on nothing more elaborate than the hard sell – 3M, National Cash Register, Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, Shell and IBM, whose acolytes would sing of Thomas Watson, Sr, He is the fairest, squarest man we know. Sincere and true, he has shown us how to play the game. And how to make the dough. The further they drift (like the men in head office eyries), from the hard base of making dough by selling, the more ineffective companies become in the market-place.
“What business are we in?’ may help in brooding about the future – about the delicious directions which the com y could or should take. But even that is dubious. Every single large company which diversified into computers had many excellent reasons, based on realistic definitions of its business, for adding computer capacity. Yet every single one suffered untold grief as a result. They failed not by misunderstanding what business they were in, but by not seeing what business computers were in – and that overwhelmingly, was the replacement of punched-card machines.
The first real marketing question is this: “How do we truly make our money?’ The answer, even in the largest conglomerates, usually comes down to that one basic area, established since its time began, in which the company is the lord of the market. Defending and extending this position must have the overwhelming priority. The next two marketing questions are: How can we improve the key products and their manufacture?’ and ‘How can we improve our selling?’
The major asset of any business is the expertise acquired over time in its fundamental activities; and that is revealed, not by broad markets, but by specific products. The US railroaders would have made a mess of road or air transport because, lacking equipment and experience, they would have failed to understand unfamiliar technologies of selling or operation. The moral is not ‘Look after your production and selling, and your marketing will look after itself’; simply that stuffing the company into a bag marked ‘marketing concept’ makes not a whit of difference to is myopia, arthritis, constipation or any other of the diseases to which corporate flesh is heir.
Excerpted from pages 49-50 of ‘The Naked Manager by Robert Heller