EDWARD S. SUCHERMAN & ASSOCIATES LTD.

Most of the people reading this blog know the difference between passive and active investing.  Passive investors buy stocks and keep them, letting them rise and fall with the tide of the S&P and Dow Jones averages.  Active investors drive their own futures, investing in businesses they can create, run and build themselves. Passive investors almost always struggle with finances their entire lives.  Active investors are the big winners – Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, etc.

Marketing follows the same principle.  If you simply wait for customers to come to you and do not spend anything on marketing, you usually watch your company die over time.  If you actively reach out and find your market and drive it to your doors, you have a much better chance of success.  This does not mean that any company should be flippant with their budgets.  But it does mean they should have an active  marketing budget, and that they should consider marketing to be an investment, not just an expenditure – a waste of money.

As our nation begins to climb out of the Great Recession, most companies are run by CFOs who have no belief in or feeling for marketing.  I have watched companies like this self-destruct for the past two years.  What’s more, by eliminating all marketing functions, they have also eliminated marketing research.  Since demographics changes have impacted virtually every market – consumer, B2B, or industrial – these companies have no way of knowing what their new clients and prospects want or need.  If they have survived to this point by cutting back, they are now as good as dead.

I blame this on the influx of MBAs into top management.  I am an MBA and have taught them.  But I always questioned what business schools preached – to go after short term gain and ignore long term planning.  Japan, Inc. plans 25 and even 50 years in advance.  Public American companies cannot plan beyond the current quarter.  With that kind of pressure and short term thinking, it is easy to understand why companies lose great people and miss entire markets, and why our nation is in the process of losing out economically to China and India.  Innovation – the American character trait that has been our forte since the beginning – has now been usurped by the Chinese.  They aren’t just copying most of our inventions, as Japan did after World War II.  They are doing most of the inventing, especially in green technologies and clean fuel.

When will American companies wake up?  Our greatest companies and industries were not founded by accountants and tax lawyers, but by inventors and entrepreneurs.  Slowly, as these founders have died off, CFOs and CPAs have taken charge.  And look what we have today: an economy in ruin because of the excesses of Wall Street and companies that refuse to invest in order to come back from the recession.

Jobs lag because marketing budgets lag.  Marketing actively creates sales, sales mean revenues and orders, revenues and orders make companies grow.  I have never seen so many fearful CEOs without vision, and empowered CFOs running companies.  Of course, CFOs are all about cutting costs – mainly, people and marketing budgets. 

Great companies, industries, and economies are built by fearless, intelligent, and motivating leaders.  The great marketing campaigns that literally built companies – from airlines to frozen foods, from cars to giant retailers, from pharmaceuticals to soft drinks, from machine tools to hamburgers – all happened because CEOs backed marketing efforts and defended them against the short term thinking of CFO-types.  In every company, in every industry, we need our leaders to step up to the plate and get aggressive.  Let’s be players on the fields and not just fans in the stands.

Let’s start hitting home runs.  Over ten million unemployed American workers and ten times that many fearful employees are just filled with pent-up energy and talent.  They are waiting for the chance to give something their all.  The world knows what happens when Americans fight together, as a people – there is no human power and brilliance like it. 

Today, we have great media choices — TV, cable TV, the Internet, e-marketing, SEO - web sites, direct mail, magazines, newspapers, billboards, brochures, public relations articles and speeches, trade shows, blogs, etc.  We can reach new markets (there are only new markets — the old ones have changed forever) as groups or individuals.  Every city and every state is loaded with marketing and sales talents.  The world’s best universities have taught them.  Their experiences helped create the greatest economy and standard of living the world has ever seen.

Let’s start fighting our way back.  Don’t eliminate marketing – let it lead the way!

Ed Sucherman

THE MARKETING MACHINE

www.edsucherman.com

http://edsucherman.com/edsblog/

 

Tags: Demographic change, Fear, Internet, Marketing talent, Public Relations //