Marketers must drive growth and ‘stop hanging out with agencies’, says Virgin Mobile chief
Virgin Mobile’s chief executive David Scribner has urged marketers to step up and become the driver of growth for their company and not let “scoreboard operators” dictate strategy.
Scribner, one of only a few marketing chiefs to have been elevated to CEO level, said marketers’ customer-centric approach makes them best placed to lead business growth.
But they must also work in tandem with their IT counterparts to produce “hard measures” of success, he said, and expand their influence within the business rather than “hang out” with agency friends.
I feel a little sorry for marketers. Businesspeople are rational creatures and, as this guy says, look for ‘hard measures’. But the reality is that many consumers are buying their product for completely non-rational reasons, e.g. they like the way it looks, they like the colour, they think it’s cool, their mate bought it, they think the ad’s funny, etc. That’s the reality. But try explaining that to a typical CEO.
Sounds like he is talking about a vacuum that a good product management discipline has largely filled
Most of the marketers in my company are a bunch of time and resource sapping wankers. Then there’s the rest who couldn’t fall over a new idea unless someone gave them 20 PowerPoint slides on it.