On a recent bender with some marketing buddies the subject of marcom (aka the marketing communications department) came up. And through our collective whining, I made a horrifying discovery. At some point in the three years since I was a marketing communications person, the skillset has gone away. Consider this: my friend needed a sell sheet created for a new product. Pretty simple stuff for a marcom team. Write it, lay it out, order the prints.
Instead, they made her write a brief, which she resentfully did and took it back. The marcom team then rewrote the brief and sent it to the ad agency. The agency, two weeks later, came back with a gobsmacking quote and a six-week timeline. For a sell sheet!
More than a little shocked, she asked why anyone would give an ad agency something as simple and time-sensitive as a sell sheet. The marcom people stared back. “Who else would we give it to?” “Well, nobody,” she replied, “you just write it, stick it in the template and send it to print.” “We don’t have that skillset”, they said.
They don’t have the skillset! In many, many marketing communications organizations (and these can be sizeable teams) we have replaced our writers and designers and translators with relationship managers. The skillset now is to rewrite briefs and email them to an agency. Then to call the agency every three days to extract a price, timeline and, presumably, multiple drafts, revisions, proofs and, finally, high resolution files or prints. Sometimes, just for a creative challenge, marcom people now resolve billing issues. So marketing communications can join IT, HR, customer service and procurement as former centres of expertise that have been outsourced to the lowest bidder.
In fact, some of these agencies now have ownership of all brand strategy. That’s right, brand strategy. We’re outsourcing brand strategy, folks!
I don’t dispute that agencies bring a critical mass of talent and experience and resources to marketing communications. They provide valuable counsel and an array of highly specialized services, creative and otherwise, that deliver real, measurable value to their clients.
But how dumb is it to hand over your brand to an agency? Replacing your HR people with a call centre in another country merely destroys morale and outsourced IT shreds productivity a little. But giving decisions about the brand, the soul of the enterprise, the most core of core assets, to a hired gun is just not going to end well.
It won’t end well because most agency relationships don’t end well. Agencies with decades of tenure are just one bad campaign or one CMO change-up away from losing the business. They know this and that’s why they relentlessly recruit new customers and cycle their best and brightest through the stable of accounts. It’s not to deliver better service to you today; it’s to get up to speed on your replacement when you fire them.
And when you do fire them, who is the guardian of your brand? The CMO? Since the average tenure for a Fortune 500 CMO is about 18 months, I’m pretty sure not. The marketing communications department? They don’t have that skillset, remember? No, it’s the agency you just fired. The one whose revenue you just decimated. Even the most ethical agency is not going to spend more than a token amount of time transitioning your brand strategy and culture to a competitor.
Any organization that doesn’t have several people whose job description includes brand strategy and stewardship had better revisit the old org chart and do something about it fast.
BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
I help companies have better conversations
Drop me a line at ewilliams@candlerchase.com
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This just in from MIT’s Sloan Review: Sometimes you can outsource too much! http://sloanreview.mit.edu/the-magazine/articles/2011/winter/52208/what-happens-when-you-outsource-too-much/?utm_source=Publicaster&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Jan%204%20Enews%20Gen&utm_term=Read+more+