In a slight shake-up from the usual, Dom goes solo and tackles the challenge of defining marketing and its significance within businesses today.

Drawing from over 80 podcast episodes and his own experiences, Dom outlines a manifesto for modern marketing. He urges marketers to rethink their definitions and approaches, stressing the need for a unified understanding to enhance their roles' credibility and effectiveness. This episode covers:

• Diverse definitions of marketing create confusion and distrust within businesses.
• The importance of having a clear, unified definition to boost marketing's credibility.
• The impact of jargon and misapplied metrics on the perception of marketing.
• Strategies for redefining and communicating the true purpose of marketing.

Listen in to hear the Unicorny Manifesto for the future of marketing in business.

Links 

LinkedIn: Dom Hawes 

Website: Unicorny.co.uk 

Sponsor: Selbey Anderson 

Related Unicorny episodes:

60. Cut the Jargon: Simplifying brand strategy for better results

61. Unlock the secret to beating imposter syndrome in branding

Other items referenced in this episode: 

The Propolis Community Index

Asos reduces reliance on promotions as ‘transformation’ continues by Niamh Carroll, MarketingWeek

Airbnb CMO on ditching performance marketing for big, bold brand campaigns by Kendra Barnett, MarketingWeek

68. The truth about demand creation? It’s a lie.

Definition of Marketing by The Chartered Institute of Marketing

Definition of Marketing by the American Marketing Association

56. How to change KPI chaos into customer bliss

Marketing Land by The Proper Marketing Club

Mini MBA by Mark Ritson

62. Segmentation secrets: precision marketing in niche markets

63. Market share masterclass: blending organic growth and M&A

LinkedIn responses to ‘Define Marketing’:

Definition number one: 

“Marketing is the activities of a business intended to create awareness of a company's product or services, cultivate authority in their niche and convert that recognition into purchase intent and commercial conversations.”

Definition number two: 

“Marketing is gaining trust, showing value and guiding the decision to invest.” 

Definition number three: 

“Marketing is how you prepare for future, sustainable, growth. Sales is by nature short sighted, Marketing is strategic.”

Definition number four: 

“Marketing is understanding, positively engaging, and aiding customers.” 

Definition number five – it’s a short one: 

“Marketing is generating demand.” 

Definition number six: 

“Marketing is the commercialisation and exploitation of innovation that answers a defined customer need.” 

Chapter summaries

Introduction to the marketing conundrum

Dom Hawes begins by questioning the current understanding of marketing and its implications within businesses. He shares his findings from asking marketing professionals to define marketing, highlighting the lack of consensus and its consequences.

The problem with diverse definitions

Dom discusses the issues arising from marketers not having a unified definition of marketing. He explains how this inconsistency leads to a lack of respect and understanding from other business functions.

Misconceptions and jargon in marketing

Exploring the common misconceptions and jargon that plague the marketing profession, Dom emphasizes the need for clarity and simplicity. He critiques the overuse of digital marketing tools and the misinterpretation of marketing's role as merely a lead generation function.

The flawed metrics and ROI obsession

Dom critiques the prevalent focus on marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) and ROI as primary metrics. He explains how these metrics can mislead and narrow the scope of marketing's true impact, advocating for a broader perspective.

The four P's and beyond

Highlighting the traditional four P's (Product, Price, Place, Promotion), Dom underscores their relevance and the importance of integrating them into a cohesive strategy. He critiques the modern tendency to focus excessively on promotion at the expense of other critical aspects.

Professional bodies' definitions

Dom shares definitions of marketing from professional bodies like the Chartered Institute of Marketing and the American Marketing Association. He evaluates their definitions and discusses their implications for a unified understanding of marketing.

The importance of language in marketing

Emphasising the significance of precise language, Dom argues for a clear, consistent definition of marketing. He discusses how varied interpretations can lead to misaligned expectations and efforts within businesses.

Redefining the marketing department

Dom proposes a redefinition of the marketing department, suggesting names like "promotional marketing department" to reflect its true function. He argues for a broader recognition of marketing's role across different departments.

Marketing as a practice and profession

Dom elaborates on marketing as a practice involving knowledge, processes, and techniques. He also discusses the roles of untitled marketers and the need to recognize their contributions within organizations.

Dom’s end bit

Wrapping up, Dom reiterates the need for a clear and unified definition of marketing. He calls for re-education and a shift in how marketing is perceived and executed within businesses, aiming

What is marketing and why does it matter anyway? Well, that's a question you probably get asked by your colleagues. There are lots of questions about marketing at the moment, and the more episodes of this podcast I record, the more I observe discourse online, the more I speak to my network, the more I come to one conclusion. Marketing as a profession is not helping itself. Here's an experiment for you. Asked ten people who should know the answer to define marketing. Do it, and you're going to get ten different answers. I know this because I did exactly this on LinkedIn. Now, the answers I got all came from people who have the word marketing in their job titles. And all of their replies were right, as you might expect in one way or other. But not a single one of them gave a similar answer.

They were all completely different. I have to say I'm not surprised because I talk to so many marketing professionals. It's something that I experience all the time. My issue isn't so much that we don't know what marketing is. As I've already said, all of the answers were right in their own way. And if ignorance was the only issue, well, we could rectify that with education. My issue is that none of us can agree on what it is. So when asked by a CFO, we're all likely to give different answers. Think about it. If we marketers can't get on the same page, is it any wonder that the rest of the business eyes us suspiciously? And I think this strikes to the heart of many of the day to day problems we hear about from marketers today.

Because in the absence of a clear, unifying, and commonly accepted definition, well, it's easy for others to belittle our craft. So marketing is maybe in a bit of a pickle. And today, you know, I'm not gonna bring on a guest. I'm gonna roll up my sleeves. I'm gonna give you a manifesto for modern marketing, the Unicorny way, if you like. And to do that, I'm gonna pull together all of the relevant insights from over 80 or so episodes we've recorded on this podcast. So if you're up for that, don't go away. Hi, I'm Dom Hawes, and you are listening to Unicorny. Now, this being the month of peak holiday, we're cutting our schedule back for a couple of weeks this week and next we'll be publishing on Tuesdays only, and we'll go back to our Tuesday and Thursday format on the 27 August.

Now, I'd really love to know what you think about our approach by the way of those two shorter episodes per week. It was an experiment we decided to run this year to make the podesthe more commutable, if you like. But do you like it? Would you prefer one longer show? What is the best day to publish? Why don't you let me know by sending me a message on LinkedIn? You can find me there. As I said, my name is Dom Hawes. Right, let's get on with today's show. So how do I know that marketing is in a bit of a pickle? Well, honestly, I don't think the symptoms are that hard to spot. They call us the colouring in department. They do that because they think marketing is all about making PowerPoint decks and designing logos.

Marketers who should know better claim that their department is now a profit centre. No, it's not. It never was and it never will be unless you're in the marketing services business. The proliferation of marketing jargon, or slanguage, as Rachel fairly called it to me, that shows a profession ill at ease with itself. Do we really need to invent new terms to describe what actually is very logical, measurable and proven? And in the recent Propolis community index market is reported that they now expect to deliver 38% of revenues. They're accountable for that, up from 30%. But what does that mean? How is it measured? And why, by the way, is that the metric that matters? Digital marketing provided software that allowed us all to use near real time data to support our decision making. And oh boy, did we get excited.

We threw out all the old models, claiming them to be outdated, and we sucked up the spew of new ideologies presented as the modern way by the very people who, it turns out, were selling us the software in the first place. Now, the thing is this. There were empty promises. Yes, the tools, the data, the techniques can work as part of the promotional mix, but that is all they are, part of the mix. Many of us thought these short term tools heralded a new way of marketing. So we doubled down on digital to the exclusion of everything else. Which is why I we still see marketers rush into tactics instead of concentrating effort on strategy. And in doing this, we've re educated the rest of the business on marketing's role. To them, it's about short term promotional stuff.

Marketing has become a lead factory that makes sense to them, especially the rational leaders in finance. They've been taught to measure what matters, and leads are 100% measurable. They either convert or they don't. Ergo, leads matter. And that's what marketing is. For the community index I mentioned earlier, I take the results to mean they need to convert enough leads to account for 38% of their company's revenue. Now, I'm still confused about whether that's new customers or account growth. I suppose it doesn't really matter. I'm just telling you this to illustrate a pattern. You know, in my day job I have to sell too. Of course, agency groups are hungry beasts because they're so people heavy. So I often sit down and talk about business issues and how we might help brands solve them.

And I've met quite a few marketing directors who've articulated their issue. Thus I need to generate x 100 mqls a quarter. That's marketing qualified leads, by the way. That's their objective. And the reason that's their objective is that they and their team are remunerated largely on marketing qualified leads. Miss the target, miss the money. Now I walk away from those types of scenario because such a narrow view of marketing's role, often masks are much bigger malaise going on in the background, and I think ROI is a symptom of the same approach. I have marketing leaders quoting an ROI ratio to me as evidence of marketing being a profit centre. It goes like we get a four to one return on every marketing dollar we spend.

We're a profit centre for the business now, but that doesn't give one a profit of 75% or make you a profit centre the four one ratio because the business still has to deliver and fund its core function and then deduct fixed costs before profit can be calculated. The best you could do, I think, is call it a 25% acquisition cost. But even that's wildly inaccurate. Even if you have got the best attribution tools in the business. The risk is one measures this period's marketing budget against this period's sales. The budget has been spent this period, but the sale process might have been running for well over a year. It would be like a farmer trying to work out irrigation needs by focusing solely on how much water is needed in the quarter when he or she harvests.

And because we've assumed that what we can't measure doesn't matter as much, because we've taken and misapplied finance, KPI's in a botched attempt to seem more relevant to the CFO because we've been cornered into measuring marketing success by sales, well, we've fallen into this trap. We measure what we generate in revenue every quarter, but we have no idea how to attribute that to our outputs, accurately or economically for that matter. So we lean in more and more to the promotional part of marketing until we become clear that promotional stuff just isn't working for us. ASOs and Airbnb famously backed out of an over reliance on short term performance marketing in Favour of longer term brand marketing. And if you over index, you will do the same, whether it's short or long.

07:22

Dom Hawes

What I'm seeing is that more and more marketers are self limiting themselves to the last of the four P's promotion. That's pr, advertising, email marketing, web stuff, design, social media, all that stuff. And I say self limiting because we've anchored a belief in our businesses that this is what marketing is. So that's what they hire for, that's what they resource for, and that's what they expect to measure. But where's the work around product price and placement that should have come first? Now, as I said at the top of today's show, I told you I'd put the simple questions to LinkedIn, what is marketing? And I invited answers by private message. And here are some of those answers. I'm going to put the full list on the show notes.

So definition number one, marketing is the activities of a business intended to create awareness of a company's product or services, cultivate authority in their niche and convert that recognition into purchase intent and commercial conversation. Okay, well, we go straight to create awareness, which is in the promotion p. There's a nod to work that has preceded this by the phrase cultivate authority in their niche. So I don't think it's a bad start, but probably too promotional for me. Definition number two, marketing is gaining trust, showing value and guiding the decision to invest. I think these are probably desired outcomes of good marketing. But if your CFO asked you, what is marketing? And you said this, I think your marketing budget might be a little meagre this year. Definition number three, marketing is how you prepare for future sustainable growth. Sales is by nature short sighted.

Marketing is strategic. Now, I can see where this one's coming from. Whoever sent me this is engaged in a conversation about long term value creation, which of course I completely endorse. I think this is probably a part of a conversation, though, not a definition. And it does seem maybe it's got a little axe to grind. It seems to be a bit adversarial with sales, when of course, we know that we need to work together. Definition number four, marketing is understanding, positively engaging and aiding customers. Okay, so we've got a customer reference that's good. And we're making it clear that our job is about understanding and engaging, but I think I'm probably missing a more specific reference to our remit on this one. And definition number five, it's a short one. Marketing is generating demand.

Oh my God, looks like creationism is alive and well in this camp. We dealt with that one, by the way, in episode 68 called the truth about demand creation. It's a lie and I won't say any more about that. Now, definition number six, and this is the last one, marketing is the commercialization and exploitation of innovation that answers a defined customer need. Well, I like the word commercialization, and I like the fact that the innovation which I'm interpreting to be a product or service must answer a defined customer need. I think there's a lot implied in this definition that I like, but I'm not sure it's going to win the hearts and minds of the CFO. Now I'm going to publish the remainder of those online. As I've said, I think that's enough for now.

But as I said earlier, no one can convincingly claim that those are right. But no one on this list is wrong either. So I did do a few other things again, which I'm going to publish on the list. I turned to some professional bodies and institutes that represent us because I thought, well, they must have a definitive answer. This is what the Chartered Institute of Marketing tells us. Marketing is the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably. Well, you know, I quite like that because firstly, they've said it's a process, and secondly, they've highlighted the importance of identifying and anticipating customer needs. And by the way, they've also thrown in the profit perspective. I think that's my closest so far.

So I went across the pond, had a look at the American Marketing association, which tells us marketing is the activity set of institutions and processes for creating, communicating, delivering and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners and society at large. Okay, that's a little bigger in concept, as you might expect from the land where everything is bigger. They've included institutions and wider stakeholders. Importantly, they've made it clear that marketing is a process. So those are just some of the examples from my woefully under resourced research project. But even with such a small sample size, I hope you can see that different people describe marketing in different ways. Well, does that matter? You may ask yourself, yes, and here's why do you think sales, finance, procurement, HR or any other functions in the business have such a hard time explaining what they're for?

And remember the sentiment I shared at the top of today's show, it matters because if we as marketers can't agree on what marketing is, well, why the hell should anyone else we work with have the slightest clue what we're doing and why we exist? And by the way, when we hear people use the word incorrectly, if we don't step in, we're adding to the problem. The word marketing should encapsulate, anchor and reinforce our role in our organizations. It should spell it out and leave nothing to chance. It tells the rest of the organization in very clear terms, what they should and should not expect from us, what's in scope and what's not. And above all, how we create value.

Meaning matters because when the word marketing means different things to different people, we can't use the word unless we're prepared to accept that simply using it might cause confusion. If you say marketing to your CFO and you're thinking about long term value creation or strategic things, and they're thinking about lead generation and shorten term things, your wires are crossed, you've got a problem. So what is marketing? When I say marketing, generally, I lean into strategy. What we sell, how we sell it, how much we sell it for, and so on. The clue is in the word market. It's about what, why and how we take a product, service or company to market. And that to me, is getting close to the right definition of marketing. Not what it does for people and companies, but pure and simple, what it is.

To be clear then, the definition of our job is to take a business, a service or a product to market. It's a process. As Geraldine Tenton told us in episode 56, our purpose is to create a happy customer. I really like that concept. It's simple and it's strong. But our job, how we fulfill that purpose, it's about a process. It's about how we take the right product or service to the right market at the right price and make it easy for the right customers to buy again and again. That's what we're for. And that's where the four p's come in. Product, price, place and promotion. Now, there's a group on LinkedIn called the Proper Marketing Club. It now numbers nearly 1500, which is encouraging.

And they created a graphic called Marketing Land, which I've posted on the show notes at Unicorny dot co dot UK dot. You are going to need to go there to see it, I'm afraid, as I can't embed it on the platform show notes. But anyhow, I think it was created by a student on marketing week and Mark Ritson's marketing mini MBA course. And basically it's a map. At the top of the map there's a c called diagnosis. And immediately inland from that, as you come down the map, there's a sign saying where proper marketing starts. And it reads market orientation and market research. Over another small body of water comes segmentation, targeting and positioning. More on those later. And then we're into execution, product price, place and promotion. And there's a sign by promotion saying where most marketers start.

So the thing about our job, which is to take a business, a service or a product to market, is that it involves all of these things. So let's dig into definitions a little more because we're going to bump into a few issues here. There's a yawning gap between theoretical and practical in many businesses I talk to and it goes like this. Yeah, yeah. Look, in theory we all know marketing should own all of the four p's. But in practice, in our business, well, we've got a whole product management team. Finance leads, pricing and the partnership team lead our route to market. So let's dig deeper into that word, marketing. This is something I've been trying to land for a few years now. Let's see if I can do a better job this time. Marketing is many different things, right? Firstly, marketing is a practice.

It's a body of knowledge, systems, processes, techniques and playbooks that practitioners apply to change behaviours, identify needs and win markets. It involves the use of frameworks, models and the four p's. Marketing is also a department. The marketing department consists of individuals with marketing in their job titles organized within an.org chart. However, many people within an organization who are not formally part of the marketing department still perform marketing tasks. Now on this podcast we call them untitled marketers. A very different thing, by the way, than shadow marketers. We might come onto that difference in a few minutes. Marketing is also a verb. Marketing as a verb, in my opinion, is often misused to describe superficial activities like creating templates for PowerPoint or basic communication efforts. And of course, marketing is also a career for many of us.

So I think we need to be clear when we say things like marketing is broken or I think I was a little gentler than that today I said marketing is in a pickle. What are we actually talking about? Well, we should discount the verb. The verb marketing is usually used with reference to promotional activity. Let's stop using it for that. Unless we're genuinely talking about taking something to market, we're just priming non marketers to believe that all we do is make pictures. The practice of marketing as a standalone could be said to be in a pickle, partly because it's misunderstood and partly because the academics who are driving the science side of the practice, they're not really playing that nicely at the moment. But as I've said in previous pods, you judge the success of a business's marketing by the success of the business.

The practice of marketing is the process of taking products or services to market. If you're doing that well, the business will be thriving. So then the question is, well, who's doing the marketing? And increasingly I'm seeing that large parts of the marketing process are being done by people outside the marketing department. They're spread across the business. And if we’ve taught our businesses and our execs to believe that marketing is promotion, that’s not too surprising. I guess you could argue that we all work in marketing. After all, we all work to help a business take itself, its products or its services to market. That’s why there’s a paycheck at the end of it. That means that even if you don’t have the word marketing in your job title, you are probably still contributing or being engaged in marketing every day.

Even if it is in a tangential way. It's not surprising. There's confusion. So when I say the word is broken, what I really mean is there are so many definitions that all of them become meaningless. The issue though isn't with marketing as a practice, healthy businesses must be doing all of these things. Well, when I say all of these things, I mean orientation, segmentation, targeting, position and the application of the four P's. Again I say four. There used to be four, now there are seven. Apparently unless you're a purist, in which case there are still only four. Or if you're Mark Ritz and there are only fucking four. Now as I mentioned earlier, the original four are product, price, place and promotion. And the seven with those four have people processing physical evidence added.

Now look, whether it's four or seven, honestly, it doesn't matter. And I don't really care because most people only think about the promotion piece when they think about marketing. These days, the three other P's have been taken away from the marketing department. And as professor says in marketing week, most marketing teams no longer work on any form of product implementation like price. It's become the province of organizational others who enjoy more of your company's confidence. But is that really a problem? I'm not sure it is. Product, price and place are simply too large, too complicated, too multi dimensional in many enterprise scale businesses. And if the work's getting done, does it matter if the person doing it has marketing in their job title? In episodes 62 and 63, Rachel Fairley met Duncan Danes. He’s removed marketing from his own job title.

You might not see the need to go as far as that, but I think he is onto something. To many, marketing seems to be a synonym for promotion and that’s often where we hear the term marketing mix being misapplied. The marketing mix isn’t the mix of channels or techniques you use to promote your product and services. Its the four P's we talked about earlier, advertising, pr, direct marketing, email marketing and other communication activities. That's the promotional mix because er, that's what they do. So could a chief marketing officer work with other departments to provide the customer view and the expert customer input to product price and place strategies and rename the marketing department the promotional department, or the promotional marketing department? Or the marketing communications department? You might be writing me off as a pedant or a semantic dogmatist, but the thing is this.

I truly believe language matters. My favourite quote, which you will have heard on this podcast, is one of George Orwell's from 1984. Syme tells Winston that the ultimate goal of newspeak is to manipulate the language of the populace to such an extent that they change consciousness and eliminate even the possibility of thought crime. As he tells Winston, the revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. And so it is with marketing. We've manipulated our language to such an extent that it's changed the consciousness of what fellow execs believe marketing is or what it's capable of. So maybe we should be thinking about resetting the frame. We're all marketing our products all the time. It's just that most of the marketing these days is done by people who is rich and says enjoy more of your company's confidence. Well that really hurts.

But maybe it is close to the truth. But I think it's probably time we stopped scoring own goals and then complaining about losing. So let me be clear. In my view, marketing as a discipline is not in crisis. Quite the opposite. Companies continue to bring themselves to market really well. Yeah, marketers have seeded ground over the last ten to 15 years. But that's okay. We just need to think differently about how we create value and how we can maximize the marketing processes in our companies. We may need to rethink how we train the next generation of CMO’s, of course, because they're probably not getting exposed to enough of the marketing mix. But that's about education and career planning, something most businesses are really good at.

And so, as I come to the end of today's show, part one of my manifesto, here's where I've got to language matters. We need to be clear about and guard use of the word marketing to mean the process I've talked about today. Now, that process is too big, it's too complicated and too dynamic to be managed by one department in the digital age. So maybe it's no longer appropriate to have a marketing department or have marketing our job titles unless we qualify them as in marketing communications manager. If the remit is communication and promotional marketing, let's call it that. And let's re educate the business about the true purpose of marketing one word at a time. After all, it takes a village to bring a product to market. You have been listening to Unicorny. I'm your host, Dom Hawes.

Nichola Fairley is the series producer, Laura Taylor McAllister is the production assistant, Pete Allen is the editor, and Peter Powell is our scriptwriter.