A marketing department is where marketing goes to die

'Marketing is everything a company does that affects the customer's opinion of it.

The products that the company sells, the attitude of its sales staff, the type of stories that get told about it, where its stores are located etc etc etc; all of these things are a part of the complex mix of factors that make up 'marketing'.

But in practicality what happens in most companies is that there is one department in the firm, that gets called 'Marketing', then the mandate that gets handed to them...is simply a communications function.

Typically marketing departments are given the responsibility to create and distribute pieces of communication targeted primarily at customers. Certainly customer communication is an important series of tasks to deliver on behalf of the business, but it's only a small portion of what marketing needs to excel at for a business to sustainably thrive.

The obvious risk to the performance of the business when marketing is framed in this constrained way is that the rest of the business, who don't consider themselves part of 'the marketing department', don't hold their performance up to a metric that is primarily customer-orientated. Because marketing is not their job, marketing metrics simply do not apply to them. Within this vacuum of accountability, operational teams focus on cost optimisation and efficiency as their core KPIs that are not contextualised against demand-side performance.

The result is critical marketing dilution and an organisation that is not orientated towards the only key performance indicator that matters: quality customer demand.

Marketing is not a department or a job title. Marketing is a mindset that the whole business should be built around.

When quality customer demand is lacking it's very easy to assign blame to the 'marketing department'. When external trading conditions deteriorate and demand weakens it feels intuitive to immediately slash all spending on 'the marketing budget' in a knee-jerk, fear-based reaction. But sub-par quality customer demand is a problem that belongs to every part of a brand's value chain. It can't be isolated, or viewed as a luxury that's only relevant when times are great and customers are willingly spending money with reckless abandon.

Marketing is the most important dimension of any business. Marketing departments are a dangerous illusion that should be retired by businesses that are serious about outperformance.