CIM Live Debate Manchester

MARKETING FUTURE FOCUS: 2015 – 2025 North West

cim.co.uk

DEBATE

DEBATE

MARKETING FUTURE FOCUS:NORTH WEST THE CHAIR The panel was chaired by Caroline Theobald, managing director of the Bridge Club.

Caroline founded Bridge Club Ltd in 2000 as a private company with a mission to ‘champion, foster, and accelerate enterprise and entrepreneurship’.

Bridge Club has introduced thousands of people to like-minded individuals and given them access to a wealth of contacts. These connections have resulted in successful partnerships, lucrative contracts and a whole host of other business benefits. In 2007, Caroline accepted a Queen’s Award for Enterprise Promotion and became Honorary Consul for Sweden. In recognition of her Consul work, she was made the honorary chairman of the north east chapter of the Swedish Chamber of Commerce in 2010 and now has the satisfaction of seeing the formalisation of ‘Creative Links’ a formal commitment to collaborate between North East England and region Vastra Gotaland.

She sits on the boards of several companies, is the co-founder of Gabriel Investors LLP and the Northern Institute for Business Ethics and chairman of International Newcastle.

She is also the independent chairman of the BQ Live debates that take place around the country.

Davide de Maestri is chair of CIM North West and brand and insight director at Kenyon Fraser. He was formerly Liverpool FC brand director, M&C Saatchi group account director and Saatchi and Saatchi group account director.

He joined Kenyon Fraser in September 2011.

He has more than 20 years of marketing and brand management experience under his belt, and has previously worked with a wide range of global brands such as Mars, Gillett, Silk Cut, British Airways and Mirror Group (UK).

Jamie Peate is director of strategy and insight

CIM is convening the largest conversation in marketing history with the Marketing 2025 Hackathon. This is an ambitious open innovation initiative designed to crowd source practical ideas and solutions to the issues, challenges and opportunities facing marketing over the next decade.

The foundations were laid for the Hackathon with a round table discussion in Manchester – one of a series of live events in 11 cities across the UK - marking the start of a dialogue amongst marketers internationally to help articulate the 10 to 12 key themes which the Hackathon should address. In this event senior marketing leaders shared their thoughts and perspectives with an audience in a dialogue that comes in a highly interactive, participative experience looking at the big issues 10 years out which could make or break marketing’s influence and value. This is mirrored by a virtual dialogue on Twitter using #marketing2025.

at McCann Manchester. After deciding that a career as a nuclear physicist was not for him Jamie joined Lever Brothers as a trainee brand manager in the ‘lavatory care’ team before moving onto laundry and working on the launch of Persil Liquid. Jamie founded Blue Banana, the research and insight consultancy, in 1990 to bring greater consumer understanding to clients and more applied approach to innovation. He joined McCann Manchester four and a half years ago and is now responsible for providing planning support across a broad spectrum of clients, with strong experience in retail, health and wellbeing and food and drink.

His highly divergent client experience includes Aldi to Waitrose, Liverpool One to Bargain Booze, Shire Pharmaceuticals to AstraZeneca, Unilever to P&G, Mars to Kellogg’s.

Richard Kenyon is chair of the CIM on Merseyside and director of marketing and communications at Everton Football Club. He joined Everton in 2014 after a spell working with the club in an interim capacity. Prior to joining Everton, Richard ran Kenyon Fraser - a marketing and PR agency with a specialism in sports and leisure. Here he worked with clients

02

including the R&A and the Open Golf and Aintree Racecourse and the Grand National.

Richard is qualified with an MBA, is a fellow of The CIM and has achieved Chartered Marketer status.

Chris Daly is director of customer experience at CIM. Having joined the marketing organisation in 2001 as operations manager in its training division, he has since held various posts before moving to membership services. He now heads up a team that supports members with their enquiries relating to applications, renewals, benefits, online issues and assessment entry.

He was promoted to director of membership in July 2011 and now has responsibility for all of the membership services and CIM’s international membership operation, UK regional and branch network, and the many special interest groups throughout the world.

He was educated at Eton College before gaining a BA in Modern History, Politics and Russian Studies from Durham University.

He went on to acquire a broad spectrum of management experience ranging from roles in the City, The British Army, attaining the rank of Major with The Blues and Royals, Household

Cavalry Regiment; and on leaving the army joined the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 1995 Caroline Theobald: “There’s a really interesting group of people in the room.

We’ve got big retail brands here, white label companies, marketing and branding and digital agencies, people who specialise in business transformation and succession planning. We’ve got cyber security specialists, people who work in marketing for law firms and civil engineers and marketing students. We’ve got people from big and small companies and academics.

We’ve got lots of different voices so please remember this is your conversation. The purpose of tonight is really to pull out some big themes about what should be discussed at the CIM’s big innovation experiment that is the hackathon and to hear from people at the coalface.”

Chris Daly then provided an overview of some of the challenges facing marketing and marketeers today against a backdrop of rapid change in the sector.

He said: “If we look at what the world was like 10 years ago, we can see just how much it has changed. Twitter hadn’t been invented, Facebook was limited to a couple of American universities, LinkedIn hadn’t reached profitability, Gmail and Google Maps weren’t around, there weren’t any apps and implementation took months as opposed to minutes. It’s extraordinary.

“That was just 10 years ago and the pace of change is not getting any slower; in fact it’s

If we look at what the world was like 10 years ago, we can see just how much it has changed. Twitter hadn’t been invented, Facebook was limited to a couple of American universities probably going to get faster.

“It has had a transformational impact on how we work and on our lives as individuals. And no corner of business has felt this change more than marketing,” he added. He explained how there has been a distinct shift in power from brands to consumers in recent years.

“People now want to know what are the values of you as a business, how ethical are you as an investment,” he said.

“Through social media and the web there is a new model of engagement, and it’s really based on broadcast dialogue. Customers actually now want to have that relationship and people want to have a relationship with people they do business with.

“There also has been a meteoric rise in customer expectation. Doing the basic stuff is child’s play at the moment, and it’s now about how you can exceed expectations. People want communications that are timely, relevant and personal.

“Meanwhile, there is an air of mistrust among consumers spawned by numerous banking wrongdoings and the politicians’ expenses

03

scandal,” he added.

“Businesses who people are spending their money on and investing in must have a clear code of ethics they must abide by now,” he said. Further challenges – and opportunities – come from the sheer amount of accessible data available to marketeers now compared to 10 years ago.

“There’s been a lot of investment in a lot of data and there is more information than we know what to do with. The question is about how you sift the smart data from the big data and how much time is involved with that.”

Another major change that has swept through organisations in the last decade is a blurring of the roles within marketing and its not-sodistant cousins.

“Where do social communications, customer services and marcomms sit, for example? And should marketing be sucked into marcomms?”

Then there is the enormous volume of people that brands and products can potentially reach today.

“The trailer for the new Star Wars film had 40 million hits in 17 hours. That is just such an >>

DEBATE

DEBATE

MARKETING FUTURE FOCUS:NORTH WEST THE CHAIR The panel was chaired by Caroline Theobald, managing director of the Bridge Club.

Caroline founded Bridge Club Ltd in 2000 as a private company with a mission to ‘champion, foster, and accelerate enterprise and entrepreneurship’.

Bridge Club has introduced thousands of people to like-minded individuals and given them access to a wealth of contacts. These connections have resulted in successful partnerships, lucrative contracts and a whole host of other business benefits. In 2007, Caroline accepted a Queen’s Award for Enterprise Promotion and became Honorary Consul for Sweden. In recognition of her Consul work, she was made the honorary chairman of the north east chapter of the Swedish Chamber of Commerce in 2010 and now has the satisfaction of seeing the formalisation of ‘Creative Links’ a formal commitment to collaborate between North East England and region Vastra Gotaland.

She sits on the boards of several companies, is the co-founder of Gabriel Investors LLP and the Northern Institute for Business Ethics and chairman of International Newcastle.

She is also the independent chairman of the BQ Live debates that take place around the country.

Davide de Maestri is chair of CIM North West and brand and insight director at Kenyon Fraser. He was formerly Liverpool FC brand director, M&C Saatchi group account director and Saatchi and Saatchi group account director.

He joined Kenyon Fraser in September 2011.

He has more than 20 years of marketing and brand management experience under his belt, and has previously worked with a wide range of global brands such as Mars, Gillett, Silk Cut, British Airways and Mirror Group (UK).

Jamie Peate is director of strategy and insight

CIM is convening the largest conversation in marketing history with the Marketing 2025 Hackathon. This is an ambitious open innovation initiative designed to crowd source practical ideas and solutions to the issues, challenges and opportunities facing marketing over the next decade.

The foundations were laid for the Hackathon with a round table discussion in Manchester – one of a series of live events in 11 cities across the UK - marking the start of a dialogue amongst marketers internationally to help articulate the 10 to 12 key themes which the Hackathon should address. In this event senior marketing leaders shared their thoughts and perspectives with an audience in a dialogue that comes in a highly interactive, participative experience looking at the big issues 10 years out which could make or break marketing’s influence and value. This is mirrored by a virtual dialogue on Twitter using #marketing2025.

at McCann Manchester. After deciding that a career as a nuclear physicist was not for him Jamie joined Lever Brothers as a trainee brand manager in the ‘lavatory care’ team before moving onto laundry and working on the launch of Persil Liquid. Jamie founded Blue Banana, the research and insight consultancy, in 1990 to bring greater consumer understanding to clients and more applied approach to innovation. He joined McCann Manchester four and a half years ago and is now responsible for providing planning support across a broad spectrum of clients, with strong experience in retail, health and wellbeing and food and drink.

His highly divergent client experience includes Aldi to Waitrose, Liverpool One to Bargain Booze, Shire Pharmaceuticals to AstraZeneca, Unilever to P&G, Mars to Kellogg’s.

Richard Kenyon is chair of the CIM on Merseyside and director of marketing and communications at Everton Football Club. He joined Everton in 2014 after a spell working with the club in an interim capacity. Prior to joining Everton, Richard ran Kenyon Fraser - a marketing and PR agency with a specialism in sports and leisure. Here he worked with clients

02

including the R&A and the Open Golf and Aintree Racecourse and the Grand National.

Richard is qualified with an MBA, is a fellow of The CIM and has achieved Chartered Marketer status.

Chris Daly is director of customer experience at CIM. Having joined the marketing organisation in 2001 as operations manager in its training division, he has since held various posts before moving to membership services. He now heads up a team that supports members with their enquiries relating to applications, renewals, benefits, online issues and assessment entry.

He was promoted to director of membership in July 2011 and now has responsibility for all of the membership services and CIM’s international membership operation, UK regional and branch network, and the many special interest groups throughout the world.

He was educated at Eton College before gaining a BA in Modern History, Politics and Russian Studies from Durham University.

He went on to acquire a broad spectrum of management experience ranging from roles in the City, The British Army, attaining the rank of Major with The Blues and Royals, Household

Cavalry Regiment; and on leaving the army joined the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 1995 Caroline Theobald: “There’s a really interesting group of people in the room.

We’ve got big retail brands here, white label companies, marketing and branding and digital agencies, people who specialise in business transformation and succession planning. We’ve got cyber security specialists, people who work in marketing for law firms and civil engineers and marketing students. We’ve got people from big and small companies and academics.

We’ve got lots of different voices so please remember this is your conversation. The purpose of tonight is really to pull out some big themes about what should be discussed at the CIM’s big innovation experiment that is the hackathon and to hear from people at the coalface.”

Chris Daly then provided an overview of some of the challenges facing marketing and marketeers today against a backdrop of rapid change in the sector.

He said: “If we look at what the world was like 10 years ago, we can see just how much it has changed. Twitter hadn’t been invented, Facebook was limited to a couple of American universities, LinkedIn hadn’t reached profitability, Gmail and Google Maps weren’t around, there weren’t any apps and implementation took months as opposed to minutes. It’s extraordinary.

“That was just 10 years ago and the pace of change is not getting any slower; in fact it’s

If we look at what the world was like 10 years ago, we can see just how much it has changed. Twitter hadn’t been invented, Facebook was limited to a couple of American universities probably going to get faster.

“It has had a transformational impact on how we work and on our lives as individuals. And no corner of business has felt this change more than marketing,” he added. He explained how there has been a distinct shift in power from brands to consumers in recent years.

“People now want to know what are the values of you as a business, how ethical are you as an investment,” he said.

“Through social media and the web there is a new model of engagement, and it’s really based on broadcast dialogue. Customers actually now want to have that relationship and people want to have a relationship with people they do business with.

“There also has been a meteoric rise in customer expectation. Doing the basic stuff is child’s play at the moment, and it’s now about how you can exceed expectations. People want communications that are timely, relevant and personal.

“Meanwhile, there is an air of mistrust among consumers spawned by numerous banking wrongdoings and the politicians’ expenses

03

scandal,” he added.

“Businesses who people are spending their money on and investing in must have a clear code of ethics they must abide by now,” he said. Further challenges – and opportunities – come from the sheer amount of accessible data available to marketeers now compared to 10 years ago.

“There’s been a lot of investment in a lot of data and there is more information than we know what to do with. The question is about how you sift the smart data from the big data and how much time is involved with that.”

Another major change that has swept through organisations in the last decade is a blurring of the roles within marketing and its not-sodistant cousins.

“Where do social communications, customer services and marcomms sit, for example? And should marketing be sucked into marcomms?”

Then there is the enormous volume of people that brands and products can potentially reach today.

“The trailer for the new Star Wars film had 40 million hits in 17 hours. That is just such an >>

DEBATE extraordinary volume of people. So should that type of channel of communication rest with the CIO or the CTO and who is analysing that?

Who owns that digital situation? Who has responsibility for the brand?”

Daly went on to explain that, in some businesses, HR departments have responsibility for brands now. “They feel their staff should be living and breathing the brand values that they personify and therefore HR really gets the brand.

“Diageo [the global drinks empire] doesn’t have a director of marketing, it has a director of brand and it’s all about ‘brand values’, so where does marketing fit in? What will the landscape look like in the next 10 years?”

He suggested that marketing could either be marginalised or strengthen by positioning itself at the heart of businesses and business strategy.

“Do we lose ground to the brand people and customer service operations? Or is customer experience and business development where the real sales and marketing functions exist?

“Or, can we get that marketing position really clearly understood, at the centre of strategic business decisions, irrespective of the size of the organisation?

“So I think we need an understanding of how we can position marketing at the centre of that business decision-making process and what the challenges are that we need to overcome.”

Caroline Theobald: “So what are going to be the big issues in marketing in 10 years time?

What’s going to make or break marketing? To get us thinking, let’s hear from our panellists.”

Jamie Peate, who has an academic background in physics, compared the evolution of marketing to that of science. “If you look at the discipline of science,” he said, “when it discovers something it really then subscribes to this idea of standing on the shoulders of giants.

In other words they take the information they’ve learned and then build on it and go forward. I somehow think marketing hasn’t got that.

“Also, we live in a world now where everything is about the new. Marketing is obsessed with the new, like big data and smart data. But some of the old things that marketing was originally founded upon seem to have been forgotten and lost from the marketeers’

DEBATE

toolbox of things they use when doing their job. I think that’s an extremely dangerous thing. In our seduction of the new, we perhaps lose sight of a lot of the things that are most interesting to us.”

Jamie cited a study carried out by two eminent advertising experts whose extensive research investigated the importance of various elements within a campaign.

“After analysing around 30 years of data,” said Jamie, “they concluded that: ‘The right mix in advertising between more emotional stuff and activation of stuff – stuff that says ‘do this now’ – is 60% to 40%.’ So you should invest more of your money in emotional creative advertising, it works better. No kidding.

“So why after all these years do we still doubt that to be the case? And yet I have those kinds of debates day in and day out with clients and marketeers about whether their advertising is getting across key messages and whether it’s too emotional.

“The emphasis is moving away from direct communication and emotion. Yet all the data from the most prestigious organisations in our disciplines say that shouldn’t be the case.”

Jamie also explained an often-forgotten, but important, factor which should be on every brief.

“Last year the UK spent something like £18.3bn on advertising. Of that advertising about 4% was recalled and liked and about 7% was recalled and not liked. So the frightening fact is that there is 89%, or about £17bn worth of advertising that is not remembered at all.

04

“That would suggest to me that the most important thing you should write on a creative brief as the key objective that you want to achieve is ‘remember me’. When was the last time anybody wrote that as their key objective?

We very rarely see it on any sort of creative brief.”

Jamie also highlighted a perhaps uncomfortable truth for marketeers in relation to brands.

“People are just not that interested in brands.

They’re really not. And in a world where we have multiscreens and more points of information than ever, we as marketeers might think that [branding] is the whole world, but it’s really not. What we should be striving for is for people to notice and remember what we are doing, not always worrying about the messages that we want to put across. We need to be remembered first.”

Next, Davide de Maestri, who has worked extensively on both the client and agency side of marketing, set out his concerns about the future of the profession.

“The first one is about trying to recognise as we go forward to 2025 the true value of marketing. What is the true nature and purpose of marketing? What we seem to have forgotten is that the business of enterprise is around marketing and innovation. Those are two very important functions. They create revenues and profits, all the other functions cost money, like HR, IT and management and the rest of it.

“We’ve got to recognise that marketing is the driver of growth, not just a service provider.

Marketers need to think about the marketing mix. Product, price, promotion, place, people, process et cetera, are all important little ingredients. But we’ve all got to fall out of the habit of calling people who are promoters marketers because they are not. There is a distinction between the two.

“Agencies are being asked by clients increasingly and will be going forward to think about creating the magic. Not just the functional stuff. And it’s very interesting because the magic is around ideas, innovation, solving problems; a lot of different things. But the magic is not something that you can value very easily.

“So for me I think we should be called The Chartered Institute of Growth. We need to reframe marketing. It would be great to have chief growth officers to incorporate all of this.”

He also drew attention to the problematic issue of putting price on this ‘magic: “How do you value the magic? I hope agencies can find a way of doing that in a better way.

It’s a bit unimaginative at the moment; you buy blocks of time, most cheaply usually. But going forward to 2025, hopefully there will be more discussion and debate about how do we actually value that magic? A lot of time actually goes into crafting ideas, which creates substantial value. Sometimes they are shut down by inexperienced people or ill informed committees and it doesn’t seem to be the right place to be when you are creating something that has significant value.

“So finding a way of agencies working with clients that looks at outputs but also which looks at outcomes, what’s being created and arriving at new models of working that I think puts some proper value on it.”

Drawing on his experience as a trainer and coach, Davide also suggested that a shift in where marketing features in the structure of organisations could be in the offing in the coming years.

“It strikes me that today, with social media and the importance of customer service online and off-line, you have an opportunity for HR and marketing to merge in some shape or form.

Because if the P in the marketing mix is people and you are delivering the brand promise by your people, it’s more important than ever that HR and marketing work together to

define, build and deliver the brand, through the behaviours that are supposed to come out of the values. That way you get a really good sustainable competitive advantage.”

Davide also explained the need for greater collaboration between the disciplines of marketing and technology. He said: “Everybody is going to have a lot more data to process in the future and the user experience will be increasingly important. But often it’s just given to the digital marketing executive to focus on, rather than everybody thinking about what magic can be created around the user experience. That approach will build that reputation, deliver value and improve the user experience and interaction. It’s about thinking about how that brand experience can add value to the whole process. That would be quite interesting going forward.”

The panellist also underlined the growing demand for greater accountability in all aspects of public-facing life, which could impact on marketing in future. “I think we will see more accountability, or direct democracy, going forward. With smart phones, if we can vote for singers on TV we should be able to vote for politicians. I can’t see it being that far away to be able to do things like that.

But that will make the world a bit more accountable. Certainly research shows that millennials believe that brands and organisations ought to have more of a point of view on issues that matter or that they should get other people involved in those issues and be active in them.

“So sitting on the fence probably doesn’t work.

The days of traditional CSR [Corporate Social Responsibility] will probably come under more pressure and greater scrutiny within brands.”

Caroline Theobald then introduced Richard

Kenyon to the discussion.

He explained how, in his role at Everton FC, the word ‘brand’ is never used and gave an insight in how the club’s ethos drives its marketing strategy. He said: “Brand is a banned word because we are a club first and foremost, rather than a brand. We think that’s a real point of difference for us. What also differentiates Everton is how we engage our local community and fan base and how we develop loyalty through this club ethos.

“If you think about what being a club is, you feel you have a vested interest, you feel that you can go along and get value and have your say in it. Those are the things that underpin our club. But, on the other hand, we’re watched globally. The Premier league is watched in almost one in two homes across the planet now, it’s phenomenal - and the majority of our revenues come from broadcasting. So while we’re huge in many ways, with millions of people watching everything we do across social media and on TV, we’re still a club, a community-based sports club first and foremost.

“For us it’s really important for us to about stay true to our local community and values, while also playing in the global market.

Speaking more generally about the current and potential future state of marketing, he said: “When I worked in an agency, I didn’t think marketing had anything like the respect that it should have at the top table in a lot of organisations. And so when I joined Everton I was glad that it was a position that is valued at the very top of the organisation. Marketing and Communications are part of the senior management structure and have responsibility for a lot of the functions we’ve mentioned this evening. That was a really important factor >>

We’ve got to recognise that marketing is the driver of growth, not just a service provider. Marketers need to think about the marketing mix. Product, price, promotion, place, people, process et cetera, are all important little ingredients

05

DEBATE extraordinary volume of people. So should that type of channel of communication rest with the CIO or the CTO and who is analysing that?

Who owns that digital situation? Who has responsibility for the brand?”

Daly went on to explain that, in some businesses, HR departments have responsibility for brands now. “They feel their staff should be living and breathing the brand values that they personify and therefore HR really gets the brand.

“Diageo [the global drinks empire] doesn’t have a director of marketing, it has a director of brand and it’s all about ‘brand values’, so where does marketing fit in? What will the landscape look like in the next 10 years?”

He suggested that marketing could either be marginalised or strengthen by positioning itself at the heart of businesses and business strategy.

“Do we lose ground to the brand people and customer service operations? Or is customer experience and business development where the real sales and marketing functions exist?

“Or, can we get that marketing position really clearly understood, at the centre of strategic business decisions, irrespective of the size of the organisation?

“So I think we need an understanding of how we can position marketing at the centre of that business decision-making process and what the challenges are that we need to overcome.”

Caroline Theobald: “So what are going to be the big issues in marketing in 10 years time?

What’s going to make or break marketing? To get us thinking, let’s hear from our panellists.”

Jamie Peate, who has an academic background in physics, compared the evolution of marketing to that of science. “If you look at the discipline of science,” he said, “when it discovers something it really then subscribes to this idea of standing on the shoulders of giants.

In other words they take the information they’ve learned and then build on it and go forward. I somehow think marketing hasn’t got that.

“Also, we live in a world now where everything is about the new. Marketing is obsessed with the new, like big data and smart data. But some of the old things that marketing was originally founded upon seem to have been forgotten and lost from the marketeers’

DEBATE

toolbox of things they use when doing their job. I think that’s an extremely dangerous thing. In our seduction of the new, we perhaps lose sight of a lot of the things that are most interesting to us.”

Jamie cited a study carried out by two eminent advertising experts whose extensive research investigated the importance of various elements within a campaign.

“After analysing around 30 years of data,” said Jamie, “they concluded that: ‘The right mix in advertising between more emotional stuff and activation of stuff – stuff that says ‘do this now’ – is 60% to 40%.’ So you should invest more of your money in emotional creative advertising, it works better. No kidding.

“So why after all these years do we still doubt that to be the case? And yet I have those kinds of debates day in and day out with clients and marketeers about whether their advertising is getting across key messages and whether it’s too emotional.

“The emphasis is moving away from direct communication and emotion. Yet all the data from the most prestigious organisations in our disciplines say that shouldn’t be the case.”

Jamie also explained an often-forgotten, but important, factor which should be on every brief.

“Last year the UK spent something like £18.3bn on advertising. Of that advertising about 4% was recalled and liked and about 7% was recalled and not liked. So the frightening fact is that there is 89%, or about £17bn worth of advertising that is not remembered at all.

04

“That would suggest to me that the most important thing you should write on a creative brief as the key objective that you want to achieve is ‘remember me’. When was the last time anybody wrote that as their key objective?

We very rarely see it on any sort of creative brief.”

Jamie also highlighted a perhaps uncomfortable truth for marketeers in relation to brands.

“People are just not that interested in brands.

They’re really not. And in a world where we have multiscreens and more points of information than ever, we as marketeers might think that [branding] is the whole world, but it’s really not. What we should be striving for is for people to notice and remember what we are doing, not always worrying about the messages that we want to put across. We need to be remembered first.”

Next, Davide de Maestri, who has worked extensively on both the client and agency side of marketing, set out his concerns about the future of the profession.

“The first one is about trying to recognise as we go forward to 2025 the true value of marketing. What is the true nature and purpose of marketing? What we seem to have forgotten is that the business of enterprise is around marketing and innovation. Those are two very important functions. They create revenues and profits, all the other functions cost money, like HR, IT and management and the rest of it.

“We’ve got to recognise that marketing is the driver of growth, not just a service provider.

Marketers need to think about the marketing mix. Product, price, promotion, place, people, process et cetera, are all important little ingredients. But we’ve all got to fall out of the habit of calling people who are promoters marketers because they are not. There is a distinction between the two.

“Agencies are being asked by clients increasingly and will be going forward to think about creating the magic. Not just the functional stuff. And it’s very interesting because the magic is around ideas, innovation, solving problems; a lot of different things. But the magic is not something that you can value very easily.

“So for me I think we should be called The Chartered Institute of Growth. We need to reframe marketing. It would be great to have chief growth officers to incorporate all of this.”

He also drew attention to the problematic issue of putting price on this ‘magic: “How do you value the magic? I hope agencies can find a way of doing that in a better way.

It’s a bit unimaginative at the moment; you buy blocks of time, most cheaply usually. But going forward to 2025, hopefully there will be more discussion and debate about how do we actually value that magic? A lot of time actually goes into crafting ideas, which creates substantial value. Sometimes they are shut down by inexperienced people or ill informed committees and it doesn’t seem to be the right place to be when you are creating something that has significant value.

“So finding a way of agencies working with clients that looks at outputs but also which looks at outcomes, what’s being created and arriving at new models of working that I think puts some proper value on it.”

Drawing on his experience as a trainer and coach, Davide also suggested that a shift in where marketing features in the structure of organisations could be in the offing in the coming years.

“It strikes me that today, with social media and the importance of customer service online and off-line, you have an opportunity for HR and marketing to merge in some shape or form.

Because if the P in the marketing mix is people and you are delivering the brand promise by your people, it’s more important than ever that HR and marketing work together to

define, build and deliver the brand, through the behaviours that are supposed to come out of the values. That way you get a really good sustainable competitive advantage.”

Davide also explained the need for greater collaboration between the disciplines of marketing and technology. He said: “Everybody is going to have a lot more data to process in the future and the user experience will be increasingly important. But often it’s just given to the digital marketing executive to focus on, rather than everybody thinking about what magic can be created around the user experience. That approach will build that reputation, deliver value and improve the user experience and interaction. It’s about thinking about how that brand experience can add value to the whole process. That would be quite interesting going forward.”

The panellist also underlined the growing demand for greater accountability in all aspects of public-facing life, which could impact on marketing in future. “I think we will see more accountability, or direct democracy, going forward. With smart phones, if we can vote for singers on TV we should be able to vote for politicians. I can’t see it being that far away to be able to do things like that.

But that will make the world a bit more accountable. Certainly research shows that millennials believe that brands and organisations ought to have more of a point of view on issues that matter or that they should get other people involved in those issues and be active in them.

“So sitting on the fence probably doesn’t work.

The days of traditional CSR [Corporate Social Responsibility] will probably come under more pressure and greater scrutiny within brands.”

Caroline Theobald then introduced Richard

Kenyon to the discussion.

He explained how, in his role at Everton FC, the word ‘brand’ is never used and gave an insight in how the club’s ethos drives its marketing strategy. He said: “Brand is a banned word because we are a club first and foremost, rather than a brand. We think that’s a real point of difference for us. What also differentiates Everton is how we engage our local community and fan base and how we develop loyalty through this club ethos.

“If you think about what being a club is, you feel you have a vested interest, you feel that you can go along and get value and have your say in it. Those are the things that underpin our club. But, on the other hand, we’re watched globally. The Premier league is watched in almost one in two homes across the planet now, it’s phenomenal - and the majority of our revenues come from broadcasting. So while we’re huge in many ways, with millions of people watching everything we do across social media and on TV, we’re still a club, a community-based sports club first and foremost.

“For us it’s really important for us to about stay true to our local community and values, while also playing in the global market.

Speaking more generally about the current and potential future state of marketing, he said: “When I worked in an agency, I didn’t think marketing had anything like the respect that it should have at the top table in a lot of organisations. And so when I joined Everton I was glad that it was a position that is valued at the very top of the organisation. Marketing and Communications are part of the senior management structure and have responsibility for a lot of the functions we’ve mentioned this evening. That was a really important factor >>

We’ve got to recognise that marketing is the driver of growth, not just a service provider. Marketers need to think about the marketing mix. Product, price, promotion, place, people, process et cetera, are all important little ingredients

05

DEBATE to me when I joined the club, and of course, something I’m as strong advocate of..

“Throughout my career I’ve had contact with many businesses who view marketing as the ‘leaflet’ function within an organisation and rather than the department who can deliver the ‘light bulb’ moments and ultimately drive the strategy. Placing of marketing at the heart of business decision making hopefully is becoming more and more widespread,” Richard said.

“It does seem to have changed over the last few years and we are getting more recognised as an industry, but I think there is still lots of work to do. At Everton we have recently integrated .content, media, communications, PR, digital, data and marketing team together and I have always thought that’s the way to make progress.”

The battle to establish marketing at the top of organisations is no mean feat, Richard admits, explaining that there remains a number of senior business people that misunderstand its importance.

One of the standout challenges Richard is facing within marketing is meeting the need to personalise communications with fans while handling the sizeable volume of data.

He explained: “We have this huge amount of data coming into and from every possible channel; we have people watching us around the globe, we have people buying shirts online or using our ticketing platform, we have people registering for content on the website and social media followers. It’s always changing too.

“So getting all that data together and then, not just sending messages out, but personalising the content is absolutely key, especially for us as we want people to feel genuinely engaged and

DEBATE

part of the club.”Next, Chris Daly described how the CIM is keen to listen closely to the concerns and observations of its members amid a hugely changeable marketing climate.

Top of his agenda of issues which need addressing in the sector is: “How can we establish marketing at the centre of organisational hubs?”He added: “It’s extraordinary that marketing is still referred to as the ‘colouring-in department’ by some and it’s not taken as seriously as it should be.

People say we should get marketing into the boardroom, but it already is there, it’s just that it doesn’t use marketing language.

“So do we need to find another word for marketing? The Chartered Institute of Business Growth is one option, or perhaps The Chartered Institute of Marketing and Sales possibly. I think KPMG has gone one step further and its marketing department is called the ‘Demand Generation Department’.

“What I would like to see is for marketing to establish a leadership role within organisations.

That requires a degree of integration with all the different assets that make up

Throughout my career I’ve had contact with many businesses who view marketing as the ‘leaflet’ function within an organisation and rather than the department who can deliver the ‘light bulb’ moments and ultimately drive the strategy

06

an organisation. It requires the ability to interrogate marketing and customer data in a relevant and timely fashion, and then understand the impact of the actions that you are being asked to do. Is it return on investment, or return on engagement that we need to refer to?”

Chris reiterated his belief that marketing is both misunderstood and underrated in terms of the impact it has on organisation.

“No one would dare challenge a chartered surveyor in their work, for example, but everyone seems to have an opinion on the marketing campaign; what colour should the logo be or what the strap-line should be. It seems to be a bit of a free for all.

“Often the chief executive probably gets the concept of marketing in that he or she wants genuine organic business growth. But unfortunately there seems to be a bust up at the head table because everybody feels that they can have an opinion on it. So I’d really like to position marketing as key to any business decision that has to be made.”

Chris also shared his concerns about the rise of ‘big data’ and its fallout within marketing.

“We’re moving from an era of accountability to possibly one of forensic analysis. Currently you have this big data, but do the people collecting it know how to analyse it properly? But also if we become completely analytical to the nth degree, where is the creativity? And where is that communication that maintains personal links with customers?

“Also, sales is becoming automated and moving towards a complicated arrangement where people need to understand the needs of what the customer is looking for and effectively try to pre-empt them and channel them towards you. So is how do you deliver that activity through greater collaboration across all parts of the business, enabling marketers to be seen as key professional people. Technically, we are the defenders of that price differentiator which has a direct link to profitability.

So actually we should be taken seriously irrespective of what people may think.”

“My fear is that marketing might lose its place either to brand or business development or customer experience,” he added.

At this point Caroline Theobald welcomed questions and opinions from the floor.

Philip Dyer, chairman, strategic marketing network NXO Ltd, said: “I’ve been calling myself a marketer for the best part of 20 years.

But can somebody tell me what marketing is?

Because I’ve just listened to four people tell me four different things.

“We specialise in working with companies which are small to medium-sized enterprises, primarily B2B, but when you’re speaking to a client or customer, there is a common misunderstanding of what marketing actually is. We bandy the word around but it means different things to different people.”

Jamie Peate: “The best definition of marketing I’ve ever heard is from someone who now works for [drinks business] Diageo where he runs the whole of the Asia region. He said ‘marketing is about being better’. It’s about being better and doing things better. So if you are better across all the bits of your business, ultimately you will grow and be successful. The marketeers should be people who constantly make things better.”

Philip Dyer: “The best definition I’ve heard is that marketing is ‘an equitable exchange’.

That’s marketing for me. And it does lean towards what you are saying about making things better.”

Davide de Maestri: “I think the CIM definition, that it’s about identifying and meeting customer needs, is probably right. I think the heart of it is customers and what they need. Then as an organisation, what marketing can do is put a spotlight on those things and help you through your distribution and promotion to create demand and to fulfil that demand profitably, or get some sort of social return if it’s not a private enterprise.

“I definitely don’t think it’s promotion, which is the danger, especially with the small business audience. If you work with small businesses, they are doing a lot of the strategic thinking without necessarily realising it. They then pass on the promotional element of it to marketing. In bigger organisations, a lot of the ‘C’ level jobs are filled by finance people.

But finance supports the running of marketing which creates the wealth. It’s not the other way around. Marketing isn’t there to support finance.”

Chris Daly: “Marketing is any part of the business viewed from the customer’s

perspective.”

Philip Dyer: “Part of the reason marketing doesn’t have the respect it should have is because we can’t even define it properly ourselves, so how can we actually communicate it? It’s not done in a consistent fashion. To an outside audience it’s not understood.

“Also, when we’re talking about it, we tend to focus on large organisations. But the majority of companies that exist in the UK are SMEs, and they’re just sidelined. We have all these big conversations about what marketing is, but actually we need to think more about small businesses.”

It’s extraordinary that marketing is still referred to as the ‘colouring-in department’ by some and it’s not taken as seriously as it should be Jamie Peate: “But if you think about the idea of being better, that’s at the heart of entrepreneurialism. So if you’re running your small business, you have to think about all the bits of what you’re doing to be better and succeed.”

Peter Gaunt, training manager at coaching business Winning Pitch, explained how he also believes that small business needs and B2B work are sidelined in marketing industry debate.

He said: “I do think executives of small businesses get what marketing is about and whether they call it marketing or not is irrelevant. But what the CIM seems to be about is, despite everything that’s been said, marketing is just business to consumer and we don’t get down to the sales side of things at all. I do think that’s a shame that the CIM is not trying to broaden its appeal.”

Richard Kenyon: “When I was in agency land and speaking to small businesses I used

07

to tell them to think of marketing as activities that bring you closer to your customers and potential customer. And also about building loyalty with a pay-off.

Jamie Peate: “For me the principles of marketing are really quite straightforward, but the doing of marketing is actually quite hard. I think this has led to marketeers getting very upset about that and making it seem quite complicated and creating quite complicated rules.

“Whereas I think the most interesting instruction you can get is by looking at case studies. When you look at case studies of all the different things that have happened, you learn a lot. When people watch The Apprentice, the most popular episodes are usually when they have to invent a product, come up with names and make a TV ad. And that’s marketing for me.”

Chris Daly then addressed the issue of marketing’s often problematic, intertwined relationship with sales: “From the CIM’s perspective, we do recognise the synergy between marketing and sales. A few years ago there was the idea of the marketing and sales fusion and I think there may well be an objective that becomes CIMS in five years time to try to cover that broader church of marketing and sales.“The trouble is, if you speak to salespeople, they will say they’ll never play second fiddle to marketers and, in marketing, it’s vice versa. It’s incredible the disconnect between organisations. As a small business you bring all that together yourself in any case, so you are probably the perfect example of how to get that integration of marketing and sales together.”

Peter Gaunt suggested more focus on sales within marketing training courses. He said: “When I did my CIM diploma years ago, and my son did it more recently, it stops at strategy and promotions. It doesn’t get into sales and customer engagement as much as I would like the CIM to. So if we are looking 10 years ahead, I’d much rather see a CIM that is The Chartered Institute of Sales and Marketing and get down to that depth because that’s the big thing that’s missing.”

Davide de Maestri: “I certainly think B2B is sometimes neglected or weighted lower than B2C, so I think that as a theme for the CIM >>

DEBATE to me when I joined the club, and of course, something I’m as strong advocate of..

“Throughout my career I’ve had contact with many businesses who view marketing as the ‘leaflet’ function within an organisation and rather than the department who can deliver the ‘light bulb’ moments and ultimately drive the strategy. Placing of marketing at the heart of business decision making hopefully is becoming more and more widespread,” Richard said.

“It does seem to have changed over the last few years and we are getting more recognised as an industry, but I think there is still lots of work to do. At Everton we have recently integrated .content, media, communications, PR, digital, data and marketing team together and I have always thought that’s the way to make progress.”

The battle to establish marketing at the top of organisations is no mean feat, Richard admits, explaining that there remains a number of senior business people that misunderstand its importance.

One of the standout challenges Richard is facing within marketing is meeting the need to personalise communications with fans while handling the sizeable volume of data.

He explained: “We have this huge amount of data coming into and from every possible channel; we have people watching us around the globe, we have people buying shirts online or using our ticketing platform, we have people registering for content on the website and social media followers. It’s always changing too.

“So getting all that data together and then, not just sending messages out, but personalising the content is absolutely key, especially for us as we want people to feel genuinely engaged and

DEBATE

part of the club.”Next, Chris Daly described how the CIM is keen to listen closely to the concerns and observations of its members amid a hugely changeable marketing climate.

Top of his agenda of issues which need addressing in the sector is: “How can we establish marketing at the centre of organisational hubs?”He added: “It’s extraordinary that marketing is still referred to as the ‘colouring-in department’ by some and it’s not taken as seriously as it should be.

People say we should get marketing into the boardroom, but it already is there, it’s just that it doesn’t use marketing language.

“So do we need to find another word for marketing? The Chartered Institute of Business Growth is one option, or perhaps The Chartered Institute of Marketing and Sales possibly. I think KPMG has gone one step further and its marketing department is called the ‘Demand Generation Department’.

“What I would like to see is for marketing to establish a leadership role within organisations.

That requires a degree of integration with all the different assets that make up

Throughout my career I’ve had contact with many businesses who view marketing as the ‘leaflet’ function within an organisation and rather than the department who can deliver the ‘light bulb’ moments and ultimately drive the strategy

06

an organisation. It requires the ability to interrogate marketing and customer data in a relevant and timely fashion, and then understand the impact of the actions that you are being asked to do. Is it return on investment, or return on engagement that we need to refer to?”

Chris reiterated his belief that marketing is both misunderstood and underrated in terms of the impact it has on organisation.

“No one would dare challenge a chartered surveyor in their work, for example, but everyone seems to have an opinion on the marketing campaign; what colour should the logo be or what the strap-line should be. It seems to be a bit of a free for all.

“Often the chief executive probably gets the concept of marketing in that he or she wants genuine organic business growth. But unfortunately there seems to be a bust up at the head table because everybody feels that they can have an opinion on it. So I’d really like to position marketing as key to any business decision that has to be made.”

Chris also shared his concerns about the rise of ‘big data’ and its fallout within marketing.

“We’re moving from an era of accountability to possibly one of forensic analysis. Currently you have this big data, but do the people collecting it know how to analyse it properly? But also if we become completely analytical to the nth degree, where is the creativity? And where is that communication that maintains personal links with customers?

“Also, sales is becoming automated and moving towards a complicated arrangement where people need to understand the needs of what the customer is looking for and effectively try to pre-empt them and channel them towards you. So is how do you deliver that activity through greater collaboration across all parts of the business, enabling marketers to be seen as key professional people. Technically, we are the defenders of that price differentiator which has a direct link to profitability.

So actually we should be taken seriously irrespective of what people may think.”

“My fear is that marketing might lose its place either to brand or business development or customer experience,” he added.

At this point Caroline Theobald welcomed questions and opinions from the floor.

Philip Dyer, chairman, strategic marketing network NXO Ltd, said: “I’ve been calling myself a marketer for the best part of 20 years.

But can somebody tell me what marketing is?

Because I’ve just listened to four people tell me four different things.

“We specialise in working with companies which are small to medium-sized enterprises, primarily B2B, but when you’re speaking to a client or customer, there is a common misunderstanding of what marketing actually is. We bandy the word around but it means different things to different people.”

Jamie Peate: “The best definition of marketing I’ve ever heard is from someone who now works for [drinks business] Diageo where he runs the whole of the Asia region. He said ‘marketing is about being better’. It’s about being better and doing things better. So if you are better across all the bits of your business, ultimately you will grow and be successful. The marketeers should be people who constantly make things better.”

Philip Dyer: “The best definition I’ve heard is that marketing is ‘an equitable exchange’.

That’s marketing for me. And it does lean towards what you are saying about making things better.”

Davide de Maestri: “I think the CIM definition, that it’s about identifying and meeting customer needs, is probably right. I think the heart of it is customers and what they need. Then as an organisation, what marketing can do is put a spotlight on those things and help you through your distribution and promotion to create demand and to fulfil that demand profitably, or get some sort of social return if it’s not a private enterprise.

“I definitely don’t think it’s promotion, which is the danger, especially with the small business audience. If you work with small businesses, they are doing a lot of the strategic thinking without necessarily realising it. They then pass on the promotional element of it to marketing. In bigger organisations, a lot of the ‘C’ level jobs are filled by finance people.

But finance supports the running of marketing which creates the wealth. It’s not the other way around. Marketing isn’t there to support finance.”

Chris Daly: “Marketing is any part of the business viewed from the customer’s

perspective.”

Philip Dyer: “Part of the reason marketing doesn’t have the respect it should have is because we can’t even define it properly ourselves, so how can we actually communicate it? It’s not done in a consistent fashion. To an outside audience it’s not understood.

“Also, when we’re talking about it, we tend to focus on large organisations. But the majority of companies that exist in the UK are SMEs, and they’re just sidelined. We have all these big conversations about what marketing is, but actually we need to think more about small businesses.”

It’s extraordinary that marketing is still referred to as the ‘colouring-in department’ by some and it’s not taken as seriously as it should be Jamie Peate: “But if you think about the idea of being better, that’s at the heart of entrepreneurialism. So if you’re running your small business, you have to think about all the bits of what you’re doing to be better and succeed.”

Peter Gaunt, training manager at coaching business Winning Pitch, explained how he also believes that small business needs and B2B work are sidelined in marketing industry debate.

He said: “I do think executives of small businesses get what marketing is about and whether they call it marketing or not is irrelevant. But what the CIM seems to be about is, despite everything that’s been said, marketing is just business to consumer and we don’t get down to the sales side of things at all. I do think that’s a shame that the CIM is not trying to broaden its appeal.”

Richard Kenyon: “When I was in agency land and speaking to small businesses I used

07

to tell them to think of marketing as activities that bring you closer to your customers and potential customer. And also about building loyalty with a pay-off.

Jamie Peate: “For me the principles of marketing are really quite straightforward, but the doing of marketing is actually quite hard. I think this has led to marketeers getting very upset about that and making it seem quite complicated and creating quite complicated rules.

“Whereas I think the most interesting instruction you can get is by looking at case studies. When you look at case studies of all the different things that have happened, you learn a lot. When people watch The Apprentice, the most popular episodes are usually when they have to invent a product, come up with names and make a TV ad. And that’s marketing for me.”

Chris Daly then addressed the issue of marketing’s often problematic, intertwined relationship with sales: “From the CIM’s perspective, we do recognise the synergy between marketing and sales. A few years ago there was the idea of the marketing and sales fusion and I think there may well be an objective that becomes CIMS in five years time to try to cover that broader church of marketing and sales.“The trouble is, if you speak to salespeople, they will say they’ll never play second fiddle to marketers and, in marketing, it’s vice versa. It’s incredible the disconnect between organisations. As a small business you bring all that together yourself in any case, so you are probably the perfect example of how to get that integration of marketing and sales together.”

Peter Gaunt suggested more focus on sales within marketing training courses. He said: “When I did my CIM diploma years ago, and my son did it more recently, it stops at strategy and promotions. It doesn’t get into sales and customer engagement as much as I would like the CIM to. So if we are looking 10 years ahead, I’d much rather see a CIM that is The Chartered Institute of Sales and Marketing and get down to that depth because that’s the big thing that’s missing.”

Davide de Maestri: “I certainly think B2B is sometimes neglected or weighted lower than B2C, so I think that as a theme for the CIM >>

DEBATE Hackathon would be useful.”

Alastair Scott, manager of consultancy 2Generations1Vision, agreed. “If you’ve got chartered status, you are responsible for marketing in the United Kingdom, and that includes working with SMEs.” He added that, on a national basis, marketing is an unsung hero of the economy. “This country depends on marketing to survive, including through supporting exporters and in cultural marketing. But if you look at BIS [Department for Business, Innovation and Skills] marketing isn’t even mentioned. The point is, people don’t know what marketing is. Marketing is what the entrepreneurs who start businesses do; they do it but they don’t realise they’re doing it. So we need to take the voodoo out of marketing.

It’s not rocket science, it’s simple. We’ve got to market the marketeers. It’s been left as a void at the moment so we need to go and grab that market.”

Jane Harrad-Roberts, who runs consultancy Marketing PRojects, highlighted another barrier holding marketers back; pricing issues.

“I saw a firm of architects recently and it came to that sticky point of talking costs and daily rates. I told them my day rate and, after their surprise and querying of it, I asked what their rate was and it was £750 a day. So I see the accountants, lawyers, architects and other professional services on phenomenal day rates, yet I, as a marketing consultant with over 20 years in business and experience of working with big businesses internationally, am still embarrassed to say what my day rate is.”

“There seems to be a disconnect in terms of the regard that people still have for the position [of marketing consultant]. We’re in such a fastmoving, difficult sector to keep on top of your knowledge level and I think the training in the sector has not kept to the speed of that.

“We are still here arguing how to define marketing 30 years after I first started trying to do it. And I genuinely think we’ve got to move on now, accept that we are in a changing world and start segmenting our particular sector more effectively. The requirements of firms like Mars and Unilever are worlds apart from the sort of SMEs that I see in industrial circumstances and you really can’t market the same way from one to the other, they just don’t talk the same language. Yet marketing is

DEBATE

Part of the reason marketing doesn’t have the respect it should have is because we can’t even define it properly ourselves, so how can we actually communicate it? expected to cover that spectrum.”

Davide de Maestri: “You’re right that legal firms can charge three times as much on rates than marketing companies. Whichever market you are in, your customer and what they are prepared to pay will affect what you can charge. So there is no doubt that smaller businesses on tighter profit margins will pay a certain amount.“As marketers going forward to 2025, I think it’s about making clear to all different audiences the value of marketing. To try to get people to appreciate what we do.

Marketers don’t need to be accredited, but it is a professional service and there is professional advice being given. Is that something we need to consider or has the horse bolted?”

Mark Goldsmith, international director of category management at Spectrum Brands, said: “Other professions have a lot higher barriers to entry than marketing. To become a lawyer you have to come through a five-year course, while trades like accountancy and engineering are areas where somebody can’t just rock up and think ‘I can do this’. People don’t think ‘I’ll design and build my office myself’ and even the most basic entrepreneur wouldn’t do their own accounts.“I think part

08

of the problem is that certain professions are overcomplicated, especially law and planning.

They are so overly complicated and because of that, they need experts to do it. With marketing everybody thinks they can do it, and advertising is even worse. Everybody thinks they can just knock up an advert.”

Jane Harrad-Roberts: “But if I mess up on advice, or I give the wrong strategy, it can affect profits. I’ve helped to take businesses from nought to £7m or £8m.”

Mark Goldsmith: “But you can ruin a company from bad accounts. Perhaps making businesses bigger and better is the bit that we don’t necessarily push. A company can’t be great without great marketing.”

Richard Kenyon suggested that marketing consultancies and agencies bridge the pay gap between themselves and other professional services by taking advantage of profit share opportunities. He then turned the discussion toward accreditation and training. “In 10 years time, it would be great if the chartered part of the CIM had more relevance. I think it’s a challenge for the CIM and marketers to get qualified and get recognised, but also for the CIM to make sure that they push that as being

really important. We’ve all got to take some ownership of the industry to get it recognised more.”Diane Earles, network manager at the CIM: “I often hear from CIM members who come to me when they’re looking for the job. And when I see their CVs, they haven’t mentioned that they are chartered.”

Richard Kenyon: “Yet I think if they got to the final stage of interviewing for a job and were up against someone who wasn’t chartered that would be a real advantage.

You wouldn’t employ a lawyer if they weren’t properly qualified, so why would you take on a marketing person?”

Chris Daly: “We want chartered to be recognised as being ethical, professional and meaning you get a better return on investment on your marketing spend.”

Jane Harrad-Roberts: “I do think there could be some sort of incentive for employers to part fund qualifications that raise the status of individuals by being involved with the CIM”.

Chris Daly: “Or perhaps it could be your own internal training which we could accredit.”

Jamie Peate: “Going back to the point of cost and value, I do think that across the whole marketing industry, ideas are not valued so businesses will generally not pay for ideas.

Where agencies traditionally make their money, is on the doing, but actually ideas can turn a business round totally. So I think that is a key challenge.”

Davide de Maestri backed up Jamie’s point regarding the value of ideas by referring to the Saatchi and Saatchi campaign for Silk Cut cigarettes in the 1980s. He explained how a seemingly simple idea was ultimately worth over £1bn for the tobacco firm, while the agency received a fixed payment upfront.

Moving on to the issue of skills, marketing lecturer Louise Penketh explained how she is working to plug the gap she sees between academic marketing training and the needs of the industry today. “There are lots of issues around education and, thinking about the future of marketing, I can see lots of implications and issues in areas like B2B, B2C, social media and digital,” she said.

Chris Daly: “You’re quite right that, with a marketing degree, you are not immediately qualified for the business context. So for those people in that initial stage of exploring

If you’ve got chartered status, you are responsible for marketing in the United Kingdom, and that includes working with SMEs marketing, perhaps with their first job, how do they maintain that knowledge? Where do they go to find the latest research on European legislation, on-European data, for example?

“We would hopefully help provide that, but the timing is quite difficult and by the time white papers are generated they are out of date. We now have a modular approach to our qualifications and our learning modules are more flexible so we can now quickly react to business needs.”

But Jeremy Bassett of Corve Consultancy and vice chair of North Wales CIM, called for more drastic action to tackle the compromising of marketing head on. “Let’s get a licence to practice like the other professions. Put into it all the modules of really important stuff like measuring return on investment because there are so few financially numerically competent marketers that I meet. Until we get rid of all the unqualified practitioners out of our sector - all the people without a job who are consulting through public schemes and calling themselves marketing people – we will continue to be a laughing stock.”

Jamie Peate: “That’s like saying nobody can be

a pop star without a music degree.”

Jeremy Bassett: “You can’t be a solicitor unless you’ve qualified.”

Jamie Peate: “But that is a closed shop controlled by the Law Society.”

Jeremy Bassett: “Why can’t we have a closed shop. Are we not at the hub of business? Is marketing not the thing that business revolves around? Finance supports us, HR support us; all these other functions support us. We are where the ideas and analysis and all the delivery should come from. Not in the soft communication stuff but at the strategic, board level, that’s where we add the value.”

Jamie Peate: “But it’s like saying nobody should be allowed to rise to the top of an organisation if they don’t have a particular qualification. Clearly the market hasn’t delivered that has it? Everybody here who is not qualified has the same opportunity. Nobody is closed out.”

Chris Daly: “I agree that businesses want marketers who can count, which is why we have marketing metrics as part of our modules so that they can actually justify their actions and decisions. If we are talking about ideas, if marketing is meant to be the ideas factory, if you can prove that you do have the good ideas by having your experience of business, the CIM should be able to recognise that.”

But Sophie Baxter, a marketing coordinator, suggested that employers don’t yet realise the importance of CIM qualifications.

Placing the onus on CIM members rather than the organisation itself to drive change in marketing, Richard Kenyon said: “Getting recognition for CIM qualifications is absolutely incumbent on its members. We have 25,000 members nationally and should have 25,000 people banging the drum about the need for qualifications and the value of marketing.” n

Key themes • Marketing – a clearer and more widely known definition • Reinventing the business model to put marketing at its heart • Recreating value in the profession Should we have certification to practice in marketing?

• New collaborations with other professions • Better metrics for return on marketing investment • Getting marketing to the top table in business • Better addressing the needs of the B2B / SME market

09

DEBATE Hackathon would be useful.”

Alastair Scott, manager of consultancy 2Generations1Vision, agreed. “If you’ve got chartered status, you are responsible for marketing in the United Kingdom, and that includes working with SMEs.” He added that, on a national basis, marketing is an unsung hero of the economy. “This country depends on marketing to survive, including through supporting exporters and in cultural marketing. But if you look at BIS [Department for Business, Innovation and Skills] marketing isn’t even mentioned. The point is, people don’t know what marketing is. Marketing is what the entrepreneurs who start businesses do; they do it but they don’t realise they’re doing it. So we need to take the voodoo out of marketing.

It’s not rocket science, it’s simple. We’ve got to market the marketeers. It’s been left as a void at the moment so we need to go and grab that market.”

Jane Harrad-Roberts, who runs consultancy Marketing PRojects, highlighted another barrier holding marketers back; pricing issues.

“I saw a firm of architects recently and it came to that sticky point of talking costs and daily rates. I told them my day rate and, after their surprise and querying of it, I asked what their rate was and it was £750 a day. So I see the accountants, lawyers, architects and other professional services on phenomenal day rates, yet I, as a marketing consultant with over 20 years in business and experience of working with big businesses internationally, am still embarrassed to say what my day rate is.”

“There seems to be a disconnect in terms of the regard that people still have for the position [of marketing consultant]. We’re in such a fastmoving, difficult sector to keep on top of your knowledge level and I think the training in the sector has not kept to the speed of that.

“We are still here arguing how to define marketing 30 years after I first started trying to do it. And I genuinely think we’ve got to move on now, accept that we are in a changing world and start segmenting our particular sector more effectively. The requirements of firms like Mars and Unilever are worlds apart from the sort of SMEs that I see in industrial circumstances and you really can’t market the same way from one to the other, they just don’t talk the same language. Yet marketing is

DEBATE

Part of the reason marketing doesn’t have the respect it should have is because we can’t even define it properly ourselves, so how can we actually communicate it? expected to cover that spectrum.”

Davide de Maestri: “You’re right that legal firms can charge three times as much on rates than marketing companies. Whichever market you are in, your customer and what they are prepared to pay will affect what you can charge. So there is no doubt that smaller businesses on tighter profit margins will pay a certain amount.“As marketers going forward to 2025, I think it’s about making clear to all different audiences the value of marketing. To try to get people to appreciate what we do.

Marketers don’t need to be accredited, but it is a professional service and there is professional advice being given. Is that something we need to consider or has the horse bolted?”

Mark Goldsmith, international director of category management at Spectrum Brands, said: “Other professions have a lot higher barriers to entry than marketing. To become a lawyer you have to come through a five-year course, while trades like accountancy and engineering are areas where somebody can’t just rock up and think ‘I can do this’. People don’t think ‘I’ll design and build my office myself’ and even the most basic entrepreneur wouldn’t do their own accounts.“I think part

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of the problem is that certain professions are overcomplicated, especially law and planning.

They are so overly complicated and because of that, they need experts to do it. With marketing everybody thinks they can do it, and advertising is even worse. Everybody thinks they can just knock up an advert.”

Jane Harrad-Roberts: “But if I mess up on advice, or I give the wrong strategy, it can affect profits. I’ve helped to take businesses from nought to £7m or £8m.”

Mark Goldsmith: “But you can ruin a company from bad accounts. Perhaps making businesses bigger and better is the bit that we don’t necessarily push. A company can’t be great without great marketing.”

Richard Kenyon suggested that marketing consultancies and agencies bridge the pay gap between themselves and other professional services by taking advantage of profit share opportunities. He then turned the discussion toward accreditation and training. “In 10 years time, it would be great if the chartered part of the CIM had more relevance. I think it’s a challenge for the CIM and marketers to get qualified and get recognised, but also for the CIM to make sure that they push that as being

really important. We’ve all got to take some ownership of the industry to get it recognised more.”Diane Earles, network manager at the CIM: “I often hear from CIM members who come to me when they’re looking for the job. And when I see their CVs, they haven’t mentioned that they are chartered.”

Richard Kenyon: “Yet I think if they got to the final stage of interviewing for a job and were up against someone who wasn’t chartered that would be a real advantage.

You wouldn’t employ a lawyer if they weren’t properly qualified, so why would you take on a marketing person?”

Chris Daly: “We want chartered to be recognised as being ethical, professional and meaning you get a better return on investment on your marketing spend.”

Jane Harrad-Roberts: “I do think there could be some sort of incentive for employers to part fund qualifications that raise the status of individuals by being involved with the CIM”.

Chris Daly: “Or perhaps it could be your own internal training which we could accredit.”

Jamie Peate: “Going back to the point of cost and value, I do think that across the whole marketing industry, ideas are not valued so businesses will generally not pay for ideas.

Where agencies traditionally make their money, is on the doing, but actually ideas can turn a business round totally. So I think that is a key challenge.”

Davide de Maestri backed up Jamie’s point regarding the value of ideas by referring to the Saatchi and Saatchi campaign for Silk Cut cigarettes in the 1980s. He explained how a seemingly simple idea was ultimately worth over £1bn for the tobacco firm, while the agency received a fixed payment upfront.

Moving on to the issue of skills, marketing lecturer Louise Penketh explained how she is working to plug the gap she sees between academic marketing training and the needs of the industry today. “There are lots of issues around education and, thinking about the future of marketing, I can see lots of implications and issues in areas like B2B, B2C, social media and digital,” she said.

Chris Daly: “You’re quite right that, with a marketing degree, you are not immediately qualified for the business context. So for those people in that initial stage of exploring

If you’ve got chartered status, you are responsible for marketing in the United Kingdom, and that includes working with SMEs marketing, perhaps with their first job, how do they maintain that knowledge? Where do they go to find the latest research on European legislation, on-European data, for example?

“We would hopefully help provide that, but the timing is quite difficult and by the time white papers are generated they are out of date. We now have a modular approach to our qualifications and our learning modules are more flexible so we can now quickly react to business needs.”

But Jeremy Bassett of Corve Consultancy and vice chair of North Wales CIM, called for more drastic action to tackle the compromising of marketing head on. “Let’s get a licence to practice like the other professions. Put into it all the modules of really important stuff like measuring return on investment because there are so few financially numerically competent marketers that I meet. Until we get rid of all the unqualified practitioners out of our sector - all the people without a job who are consulting through public schemes and calling themselves marketing people – we will continue to be a laughing stock.”

Jamie Peate: “That’s like saying nobody can be

a pop star without a music degree.”

Jeremy Bassett: “You can’t be a solicitor unless you’ve qualified.”

Jamie Peate: “But that is a closed shop controlled by the Law Society.”

Jeremy Bassett: “Why can’t we have a closed shop. Are we not at the hub of business? Is marketing not the thing that business revolves around? Finance supports us, HR support us; all these other functions support us. We are where the ideas and analysis and all the delivery should come from. Not in the soft communication stuff but at the strategic, board level, that’s where we add the value.”

Jamie Peate: “But it’s like saying nobody should be allowed to rise to the top of an organisation if they don’t have a particular qualification. Clearly the market hasn’t delivered that has it? Everybody here who is not qualified has the same opportunity. Nobody is closed out.”

Chris Daly: “I agree that businesses want marketers who can count, which is why we have marketing metrics as part of our modules so that they can actually justify their actions and decisions. If we are talking about ideas, if marketing is meant to be the ideas factory, if you can prove that you do have the good ideas by having your experience of business, the CIM should be able to recognise that.”

But Sophie Baxter, a marketing coordinator, suggested that employers don’t yet realise the importance of CIM qualifications.

Placing the onus on CIM members rather than the organisation itself to drive change in marketing, Richard Kenyon said: “Getting recognition for CIM qualifications is absolutely incumbent on its members. We have 25,000 members nationally and should have 25,000 people banging the drum about the need for qualifications and the value of marketing.” n

Key themes • Marketing – a clearer and more widely known definition • Reinventing the business model to put marketing at its heart • Recreating value in the profession Should we have certification to practice in marketing?

• New collaborations with other professions • Better metrics for return on marketing investment • Getting marketing to the top table in business • Better addressing the needs of the B2B / SME market

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Getting recognition for CIM qualifications is absolutely incumbent on its members.

We have 25,000 members nationally and should have 25,000 people banging the drum about the need for qualifications and the value of marketing

cim.co.uk