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To listen to some up-and-coming businesspeople these days, you might think that this thing called Marketing is something we invented a few years ago and that it is a department or a function which handles the selling of the firm's products or services in line with customers' needs, etc., etc. Some of them--the smart ones--realized a long time ago that Marketing is nothing of the kind. They have thought it through and come to the conclusion that Marketing is the business. It is not a square on an organization chart; nor is it a nameplate on a door. It should not even be called Marketing because by doing so it tends to provide a leaning post for everyone else in the company. The function should simply be called the Business Department and everyone should be a member.
In a way, the word Marketing has come to be used as loosely and vainly as Managing by Objectives. You remember that, don't you? The gurus on each side of the Atlantic made a fat living for years pretending that MBO was some new thing on the business scene. Those of us who were innocent enough believed them, forgetting why we were in business at all.
I came from an advertising agency background into a top personnel job with a U.S.-based multinational and for a time it was such a painless transplant that you could hardly see the seam. Then something happened. We began getting a procession of "experts" every month or so telling us how to state objectives, get the facts, weigh the options blah, blah.
At first I couldn't believe it. I thought it was a con--until I looked around at those eager production managers and research high fliers and planners and controllers. They were taking it all in, bless them.
I remember feeling so strongly about this naive approach that I wrote a piece "Management by Objectives is simply Management." It is still being published in various countries. This seems to indicate that even in the so-called "enlightened" countries, there must be thousands of people in management who have no business being in business at all. Why? They seem to imagine that Managing by Objectives is a special approach to running a business operation.
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