28 ADVISOR: Marketing
Avoiding the busyness trap in business COLIN GORDON marketing expert
Marketing operates at the fulcrum of every company and as such there’s always plenty of tasks to complete, but it’s important not to distract oneself with busy work - it’s what you don’t do that matters, writes Colin Gordon
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n marketing, it’s easy to get caught up doing ‘stuff’. There are new competitors to deal with, demands and challenges from customers, new communications platforms to understand, new promotional ideas. And! And you have the internal challenges to cope with. There are reports to be written, research to be understood and personnel issues to be addressed.
Internal and external facing Of all business functions, marketing could very easily be seen as having the most complex set of conditions to manage – whether they are brought about by internal or external sources. Most other functions in a company face in one direction or the other. I can’t think of any others that do both, except for marketing. The finance function tends to face internally (albeit with a glance towards banks, maybe the stock market, etc); operations tends to be focused almost entirely on the back end of the supply chain and ensuring staff and production efficiency (with a recognition that the output needs to go the external ‘world’); HR has a strong focus on managing the current staff issues; customer service is predominantly an externally focused function. Marketing captures all these, the external and internal world. It’s therefore important to prioritise and
Tim Cook took over at the helm of Apple in 2011 and has since seen the tech company’s value rise by a mammoth $700m per day
not get het up on trying to do everything. But it’s a balance. Marketing is not a general jobsbody just there to be hovering up all the parts of the business operation that others are not properly addressing. Instead, it uniquely resides on the fulcrum point of an organisation, balancing the external demands and challenges with the internal conditions and circumstances
What can we learn from Apple’s obvious success? Silicon Valley’s Constellation Research CEO Ray Wang says one of Tim Cook’s biggest achievements is simply having a keen sense of where Apple should compete and where it should abstain: “Tim’s job, every day, is to say, ‘what are we not going to do?’”. ShelfLife February 2022 | www.shelflife.ie
to create a way of clearing out all the problems and enhancing all the opportunities in an effort to drive sustained growth and real companywide efficiency. When I say “all”, I should be more careful. Given where it sits in an organisation, marketing can so easily get busy just being busy, doing stuff. It’s vital to prioritise and truly know what needs to be done for the real benefit of delivering the strategy. Doing what’s right versus what’s urgent.
A clear vision When I think of prioritising, I think of ‘North Stars’, focusing on one key metric, or what I call ‘One Big Thing’ (or Number). What are we all together trying to achieve? Are we all aligned to do what’s right to achieve
