Anyone in their 50s or older has witnessed a sea change in the marketing field over the last 30 years. These changes have resulted not only from technology, but from the continually increasing pressure on publicly held companies to improve results from quarter to quarter. In the 1970s, marketing generally was managed as a process with distinct tactics related to price, place, promotion and product. This created a somewhat institutionalized approach, often with distinct budgets for advertising, direct marketing, trade shows or events, sales, etc., and a variety of managers involved with these practices battling each year for resources.

This competitive approach could be justified by the Darwinian notion that the best ideas survive. However, in light of the difficulty of accurately measuring marketing results, the Darwinian principles applied equally to the ability of one manager versus another to charm the right people or spin the right message.

While today, lavish entertainment makes headlines, these practices and worse were a way of life as recently as the 1970s in all parts of the marketing world. Getting clients to spend money was as much about building personal relationships as it was about providing a service, since multiple companies almost always existed to do the very same thing.

Decades of downsizing since then have diminished the ranks of marketing and sales managers competing for dollars and increased the number of outside marketing agencies taking over the day-to-day work. Many of the downsized marketing managers launched these new marketing services firms with their former employers as clients. The low barriers to entry in almost all manner of marketing services caused the market of such companies to proliferate in the 1980s and 1990s, providing a wide array of competitors offering incentive programs and meetings, advertising and promotion services.

Another major change, and one that still is in its early stages, involves the notion of integrated marketing—conceived as early as the 1970s as a means of improving the efficiency of business development but which to this day has not overcome the barriers of entrenched interests clinging tenaciously to their budgets.

Integrated marketing asserts that all marketing and sales activities have to strategically address customer needs and marketing opportunities, and that individual tactics should be carefully woven to maximize customer results, rather than to support entrenched interests and budgets. This means a collaborative, zero-based planning effort that brings marketing and sales managers together to conceive of the most appropriate integrated approach for the moment, even if that means less resources for a pet project. Barriers to change are strong when they involve giving up prerogatives. Three powerful forces appear to be aligning that could finally break down those barriers:

Customer Focus

More and more organizations have discovered that the key to profitability and growth lies not just in cutting costs and improving process efficiency, but also in strategically satisfying customers, one at a time. A growing body of research confirms the economic benefits of customer satisfaction in terms of willingness to pay more and refer friends and colleagues.

At the same time, the ability of new competitors to lower costs and knock off innovations has made it more and more difficult to rely solely on the process of creating new products and improving efficiency, according to Don Schultz, professor emeritus of the Integrated Marketing Communications department of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. The result, Schultz believes, is an eventual shift in the marketing paradigm from one that is process oriented, in that it seeks to maximize the efficiency of the four Ps of marketing (price, place, promotion, and product), to one that focuses on the customer. Under this model, says Schultz, organizations will still have marketing and sales departments, but decisions will align with customer and marketplace imperatives, rather than process imperatives.

Accountability

Although the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation applies only to large, publicly held companies, its impact has been to raise the level of disclosure and transparency at all organizations seeking to maintain high standards. Sarbanes-Oxley does not have statutes that apply directly to most areas of marketing—other than perhaps the incentive and motivational event businesses, where the lines between marketing and entertainment get blurred—but it has put a new focus on accountability and measurably. And that goes for marketing as well, so much so, in fact, that major advertising companies and related industry groups have undertaken unprecedented efforts to find new ways to measure the effectiveness of their services.

Measurement

At the same time, technology has emerged making it easier and easier to measure the results of marketing, whether through visits to a Web site, sign-ups for more information or even point-of-sale transactions. The ability to measure results almost one customer at a time has not yet arrived for many organizations. But, it has already become clear that before long, most companies will be able to much more effectively measure marketing results in terms of new prospects who have signed up to receive information, prospects who have become customers, sales per customer, number of referrals from current customers, source of business (e.g., advertising, events, word of mouth, etc.).

In an environment in which management recognizes the need to conquer their markets one customer at a time, and to do so in an accountable and measurable manner, the traditional focus on defending tactical projects will gradually yield to processes that relate more closely to customer behavior and sales outcomes.

Implications

Obviously, a shift toward more accountability and measurement will favor solution-selling approaches, but do not assume that these above changes will happen overnight and across the board. It might take another decade for the business world to realize the extent of the change in both practices and mentality. In the meantime, it can never hurt for a marketing services sales team to focus on results and recognize the need to help clients meet measurability and accountability standards.

While entertainment and personal relationship building remain a vital part of doing business, and probably will for decades to come, the increased focus on measurable results will create a new breed of marketing service supplier focused on providing measurable results and clear accountability, using tools and expertise that naturally would raise barriers to entry in some domains.

A more results-based, customer-focused climate also creates more committees of people to educate about your solution, since a business development team could comprise members of different parts of the sales and marketing organization. This reinforces the need for providing useful information and positioning your organization as a "trusted adviser," as Gary Morris, CEO of Marketing Advocate Inc., likes to call it.

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