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0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best book on marketing as organisation-wide learning, 3 Mar 1997
By A Customer
From Chris Macrae wcbn007@easynet.co.uk
Join 100 marketing opinion leaders from 15 countries currently discussing this book's vital lessons for organisations with a marketing future. This is where we have got to as of March97...
Which are your favourite books or other texts which mesh marketing and learning organisation principles together in such a way that a marketing practitioner will add "learning organisation" constructs to his/her tool kit without worrying whether other people would classify them as marketing work?
Two votes for Vince Barabba's book "Meeting of the Minds" come from Tim Ambler ("excellent book and his approach has inspired some quite sophisticated market research in GM") and myself.
Below, an abstracted historical summary of how and why marketing stopped working in many Western companies of the 70s/80s. Finally, my concluding questions are tabled......Words are directly abstracted from Barabba except some linking paragraphs of mine in parentheses:
Page 43
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE MARKETING CONCEPT
The late 50s and the 1960s, a period of economic expansion, were the golden age of marketing. It was a period in which (US) companies like General Electric, Pilsbury, and Procter & Gamble were guided by executives who actively integrated marketing into every phase of the business.
Peter Drucker writing at about the same time, likewise identified the central role of marketing and innovation. To him, marketing encompassed the whole business and meant more than selling products and services or creating a marketing department. "Marketing" he wrote "is so basic that ...it is not a specialised activity at all. It is the whole business seen from the point of view of its final result, that is from the customer's point of view."
The marketing concept held the highground in management thinking for almost two decades, and these were great years for American business. Personal incomes and markets expanded dramatically between the 1950s and 1970."
(Then marketing as organisation-wide learning and customer-oriented innovation process stopped in thw West... until the Japanese woke all would-be world class businesses up. The Japanese lapped up marketing as an inter-disciplinary concept with tools as TQM, Quality Function Deployment, Hoshin Planning, as recent revelations of knowledge-creation being an essentially Japanese corporate advantage (Nonaka et al, The Knowledge Creating Company), and target market costing as an organisation-wide process which the Japanese use (instead of accountants' measures) so that an informing consensus integrates all decisions for new product business development (Robin Cooper, When Lean Enterprises Collide))
(page 47)
One example of a Japanese management technique now widely adopted in North America is Total Quality Management (TQM), a customer-focused philosophy and strategy that seeks continuous improvement in business processes through the application of analytical tools and teamwork. Quality is considered from the customer's viewpoint , and quality demands constant sensitivity to customer demands and perceptions to market information. According to one author's description of TQM , "The voice of the customer is integrated into each process and system in the organisation...(and) meeting and exceeding customer demands is the ultimate objective".
Essentially, the many Japanese management techniques that found their way to North America and Europe in the 1980s shared two common understandings: first, that all business activities represent processes, and second, that these processes have only one purpose, to satisfy customers. The methodologies that underlie Japanese management techniques are at their core ways of fine-tuning and continually improving those processes to the point that they contain nothing that does not create value and satistaction for the customer.
(BUT if you have for a generation of management lost the marketing concept, your organisation may need to unlearn and then do a lot of new learning just to get back to scratch. As Chris Argyris has explained - in Organisational Learning 2 - enormous commitment is needed to reverse short-term culture and short-termist measurements and the political structure these condition -all this at a time when companies really do need to reflect on today's extraordinary strategy change drivers. Is this too much hard work for many old board directors to (have the will to) get down too?...)
page 37:
"In its traditional form, the functionally organised enterprise, in which command and control emanates from the top, is ill suited to the demands of the modern marketing place. It separates decision making (at the top) from doing (within the functions). It links decision-makers and customers by means of a single, narrow, and inadequate channel - the marketing function. Worse still, it provides few opportunities to move knowledge and knowhow between the functions. allowing what we call organisational knowledge.
We may find the best of both worlds if we redesign the decision-making process from the command-and-control tradition of the past so that it draws from and links the functional silos in which information and knowledge ultimately reside. This process will require trust between functions, the sharing of information and knowledge, and enterprise-wide knowledge creation.
CONCLUDING QUESTIONS
Three sets of questions and one speculation to conclude are:
Q1) Apart from Japan, are all countries-headquartered companies starting from an equal handicap in this race to learn marketing organisation-wide? I don't think so. In the US quality prizes like Baldrige woke companies up to process methods and information exchanges, books like Barabba's get written, and "learning organisation" is increasingly a serious topic on many CEO's minds. I don't think it is yet in eg the UK, a country where our lack of appreciation of the intangi
But maybe you'd like to vote on countries you know best?
Q2) More importantly, if an organisation has built up two decades of inertias as marketing dumb and over-deparmentalised, what approaches do people suggest to help a company iteratively and urgently experiment with becoming a new marketing learning organisation?
Q3) Would you agree that the great irony is that - with the new information era - we are entering the fastest wealth producing era mankind has known? But one in which countries, regions and companies will not all gain? The lion's share will go to those who direct value added learning with Unique Organisation Purpose aligned by the quality/trust of marketing relationships (whose feed-forward measurement is far removed from past performance transactions that accountants and old economists count on)?
I would speculate that for many big Western organisations, the only chance of catching up with world class value adding networks will be to establish a virtual university of interdisciplinary management practices with a marketing soul.
We know that the Japanese have some leading tools/approaches for this sort of curriculum, and to work any of them properly practitioners need to exchange experiences.
Brand Chartering is an action learning approach they might also try out; there must be many other experimental approaches worth trying too.
But perhaps most importantly, shouldn't we be constructing websites as experience-hubs in marketing learning organisation where practioners can :
-download training modules from the internet on to company intranets?
-exchange in e-mail groups with other practioners creative ideas on how to plant these interdisciplinary tools in their companies so that organisation-wide learning takes off?
Chris Macrae, editor of Brand Chartering Handbook & MELNET www.brad.ac.uk/branding/
E-mail me at wcbn007@easynet.co.uk
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