Marketing should play a crucial role in identifying and satisfying customer demand. But marketing directors are more interested in the size of their budgets

A new report from Deloitte suggests that the "crisis" in marketing that has been going on for a decade or more is actually getting worse. Marketing in 3D paints a picture of a profession that is less influential, less strategic and less involved in the overall direction of the business than it has ever been.
Marketers are highly specialised, they are stuck in functional silos and they move through companies fast—the average tenure of a marketing director is 22 months. Their loyalty is to marketing rather than the business, and while they regularly complain about not being taken seriously and not having a seat at the board table, most of them lack the aptitude, attitude and appetite to become chief executives.

They don't contribute to business strategy because they lack the broad commercial knowledge to do so, and they seem incapable of coming up with a set of performance measures that are meaningful to the finance director, the chief executive and outside investors. The only metrics that interest marketers are the size of their budgets, the size of their teams and the number of brands they can notch up on their CVs.

Those whose response to marketers' plight is "so what?" don't understand the role marketing could play in driving profitable growth. Cost-cutting and mergers and acquisitions have been largely discredited as sustainable growth strategies. Investors are increasingly interested in the ability of management to identify and satisfy customer demand. This is the basis of organic growth and is supposedly the heartland of marketing.

Yet organisations' failure to exploit the potential of marketing in driving sustainable growth is about poor leadership as much as the failure of marketers to step up to the plate. The Deloitte research portrays chief executives as Walter Mitty types, who talk about being "marketing-led", but lack a concrete understanding of what that means. As such, confusion reigns about the difference between what the marketing department does and an overall marketing, or customer-centric, ethos.

But marketers themselves are as confused about their role as anyone, judging by a separate piece of research from brand agency Promise, which found that companies that under-promise and over-deliver are more profitable than those that do the opposite. No surprises there, but what is shocking is the continuing propensity of marketers to pour money into costly advertising at the expense of customer-centred innovation and service. It's a strategy that is destined to disappoint rather than delight their customers.

At the heart of marketing's chronic malaise is its appalling inability to market itself. Marketers are popularly disparaged as "flower arrangers" and in general parlance the word is used pejoratively-as in "marketing spin" or "marketing ploy". As such, it attracts the wrong kind of people—the kind who are seduced by the glamorous advertising and communications side, when the part that really matters is rigorous, commercial, quantitative input into research and development, distribution and pricing—areas that marketing once controlled, but has since relinquished.

A new book from John Quelch, professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, and a former dean of London Business School, might help redress the balance by giving marketers a "higher sense of purpose". In Greater Good, published this month, Quelch and his fellow author, Katherine Jocz, set out to demonstrate "how good marketing makes for better democracy".

One of their arguments is that marketing drives consumption, which, in turn, drives economic growth and contributes to individual wellbeing. They also believe marketing develops abilities among consumers that they can put to good use as citizens in the political marketplace—such as demanding choice, information and quality, along with products that meet their needs.
This is what marketing is about, but unless more marketing departments start doing it, the danger is that Quelch's ambitious panegyric will be interpreted as just more marketing hype.

Jane Simms is the former editor of Financial Director and Marketing Business.