Diminishing influence of marketers in companies needs to be turned

The role of marketing keeps diminishing in Dutch companies. Departments like Sales, R&D and Finance take a lot of the marketing decisions at the moment, as established by professors Peter Leeflang and Peter Verhoef of the University of Groningen. An important cause is the lack of demonstrable results of marketing activities. Verhoef and Leeflang think this is alarming and plead for a change because international inquiry shows that an influential marketing department leads to better operating profit.

Leeflang and Verhoef presented this inquiry (conducted among around 300 Dutch companies) Thursday 27 September at a seminar in Amsterdam.

“Marketers were placed in the display window before, but have been moved to a room in the back of the shop where they now work on advertising and customer satisfaction,” according to Peter Leeflang, professor of Marketing and Marketing Research. “Two, maybe three of their four key tasks slip through the marketers’ fingers.” The Sales department is often responsible for making decisions concerning prices, distribution and tapping new foreign markets. R&D focuses on product development and Finance makes decisions about the website and relationship marketing.

“A few years ago marketing was mostly a line position,” argues Peter Verhoef, professor of Customer Based Marketing and director of the Customer Insights Center CIC. Now that is the case at only 19% of the companies. At more than half of the businesses, marketing is a staff department. “They particularly support the Sales department.” Companies rank marketing lower in their organization at the moment and regard marketing costs as an expense rather than an investment. On top of that, it is hard to show demonstrable results of marketing activities; you will hardly notice any results from price promotions on the long term. Apart from that, it is a fact that a lot of new products fail.

According to Verhoef and Leeflang, there are a few tools that could make the marketer become the center of attention again: more innovation and creativity in marketing (the marketer should represent the customer rather than the organization), good marketing research, efficient knowledge about marketing techniques combined with knowledge about business economics and demonstrable results of marketing activities. There is an important role for education to play. The professors will apply their inquiry results to the Master program Marketing at the Faculty of Economics and Business.