Over the course of the past two weeks, I’ve given a lot of thought to the future of marketing in organizations, both
small and large. Social media’s influence on marketing is extraordinary and reminds us yet again that we all have to be the marketers of our personal brands, as well as our corporate brands.
We cannot be successful unless we give value to our company and the return we get is a stronger person brand, that is more credible and has a better reputation. Marketing departments are typically broken down into various sub-groups, such as advertising, public relations, product marketing (could be multiple product marketing groups), direct marketing, database marketing and more. Some company’s choose to outsource part or all of their marketing to one or more agency, depending on the company’s size. This is all set to change sooner than you think.
Note: I’ve been in several marketing departments the past eight years and am currently in one now. The feelings and ideas expressed here are forward thinking and do not account for how my colleagues feel at this time.
You, the marketer of the brand
We talk about “brand you” all the time, but when it comes to personal branding it’s also “brand them.” This means, as a brand, you must promote brands that are attached to your brand or ones you want to be associated with. What I’m trying to get at is that you can’t scale and you need to suck experience out of working for clients or company’s in order to be more successful as a brand. A brand has to serve an audience and by helping your client get on the front page of the WSJ or launch their new website, you are forming a stronger portfolio or work (resume, etc), which will help you develop as a brand. Also, as a brand you must promote other brands, such as your manager. In this way, you’re helping people that can, in turn, help your brand succeed!
You will soon be accountable for marketing, whether you are the executive secretary, the accountant, the financial analyst or the IT manager. All bets are off now, since marketing budgets are declining at a rapid pace. You will be charged with marketing on behalf of your company in order to keep your job and your presence in social media will be your path to the job of your dreams. The reason I say this is because your lists (Facebook friends, Twitter followers, blog subscribers, etc) will be part of the reason company’s will hire you! They help you get their brand out there, when advertising budgets are fading away.
Marketing department death watch
I know this title is probably freaking you out if you’re in a marketing department and I’m glad. It’s a rude awakening to find yourself without a job in marketing, where most of the layoffs currently are. Company’s are divesting in marketing, which may allow other, smaller company’s, to come in and build brand. With fewer marketing people and fewer departments or groups, comes the decentralization of marketing as a whole from the corporation. I always say that you have to work twice as hard for the same salary during a recession and it’s true.
Your added job description will be marketing soon. You’ll have to get involved in social media and promote your corporate brand because it’s going to be the only way to market it right now.
Marketers who have no knowledge in social media have negative job security right now unless they are in the top 5-10% of their discipline. Marketing agencies are going to start folding by the hundreds. All of this is going to push business schools to require a marketing class for every student and company’s to online hire people who have marketing skills and experience in social media.
The future
In the year 2020, I’ll wakeup and see every single job description on earth say “Must have proficiency, influence and followers in social media.” Everyone in a company will have to have extremely strong communication skills. The responsibility of marketing won’t be left to a department in the future. It will be up to you! Are you prepared for the future? Have you invested the time in your online brand in order to leverage it for your next position? Well, if you haven’t, be forewarned that social media will soon make or break your entire future.
Get involved now!
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Right now, most job descriptions I see emphasize “must be a good team player” or “must have great communication skills”. Since “social media” is often used as a wrapper buzzword for that as it applies to Internet-based tools as they apply to how humans have always gotten along… it makes sense that “Must have proficiency, influence and followers in social media” is a viable consequence, if somewhat vague: e.g., “Are your followers also influential?”
As a graphic designer, I’ve seen the decline of financial investments poured into creative and marketing departments. Before, I took the concepts we gathered in the creative department and output that message, brand or vision to our audience. Now I have evolved into a communications machine. As a designer, I not only design but conceptualize, develop marketing and advertising strategies and create content facilitating communication between our clients and our company. It’s a case of “Who moved my cheese?”. You must evolve with the times or fall behind and thus risk any job security at all. Your post reflects the reality of a lot of folks.
Rafael, great comment and example. I see a lot of producer managers having to take on marketing roles as well.
I agree that everyone will have to do their bit.
What I am interested in is: does this mean that there is no need for a marketing department anymore?
Or, in fact, does this mean that marketing becomes centrally important to the entire organization so increasing the need for the new marketing professionals?
Daniel, it means that there won’t be marketing departments in the future (it will be a decentralized function).
Dan, I see where you’re going with this, but it’s quite a stretch to suggest that marketing will disappear. The reason is a simple one – most people are really, very bad at marketing themselves and their company.
We tend to fetishize UGC and CGM, and get excited about social networking, but 90% of what is out there is useless, less than 1% is actually very good. The number of individuals who can create compelling content, whether visually, audio, or text is small, and the skills needed to create these take time to create.
Your website, your book, your magazine – the design and the content would not be nearly as good without experienced marketing professionals to do the work. This is much more important for large corporations. There is a value in social media, but it’s greatest value lies in magnifying traditional marketing.
Recession causes layoffs in marketing, but that’s because marketing departments often do a poor job in explaining their value, and executives tend to give credit to sales departments rather than looking at the overall picture.
The best marketers are like Rafael above, who realized that design is paired best with business sense. What is the design supposed to do? I predict that marketing suffers some in the coming years, but emerges stronger as the value of good marketing is shown to be more important than the rapidly declining competitive edge of technology.
Not sure I agree that it could be taken that far Dan.
I think there would still be a need for a marketing department. What about designing well timed promotional offers? What about search marketing? etc.
An analagy would be cleaning: even if everyone is responsible for keeping the office clean, there is still a need for professional cleaning staff
Here is a fact. The traditional marketing department of today is dead. Moving forward, traditional marketing techniques will become less and less effective until they produce zero ROI.
The role of traditional marketing is vading. Anyone who will not master this roles may not have jobs in the future no matter your professional qualification. The earlier we all learn the rope the better.We may not have to wait till 20/20, it may be earleir tahn we imagine
I think that this decentralization trend will affect the entire workplace, not just marketing. With all of the Web 2.0 tools appearing, it makes it much easier for employees to operate outside the office, and take control of various roles like marketing or sales that used to be handled by other departments. The globalization trend will also mean that work will no longer be defined in the normal 9-5 sense, but a 24/7 operation where teams across the world will come together for relatively short durations.
[...] started a discussion a few weeks ago about the decentralization of marketing and the expectation that employees would be marketing [...]