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WELCOME TO THE BOARD

With a growing number of marketing directors taking their seat at the boardroom table, it might be time to rethink your company’s approach, Lucy Aitken reports

At the end of June 2010, Keith Weed, chief marketing officer of Unilever, was named Advertiser of the Year at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. Weed is also notable for another reason: he is the first marketer at Unilever – which, along with Procter & Gamble, is one of the world’s biggest advertisers with a US$7 billion global budget – to sit on the company’s executive board. When interviewed at Cannes, he described his ultimate goal as ‘doubling our business’.

Weed flouts the caricature of marketing directors as fluffy folk who squander the family silver on some crazy creative idea that might work. This image problem leads to marketing being treated as unhelpful to corporate growth, when in fact a well-managed campaign, which has had buy-in from the board at the outset, has helped transform the fortunes of many struggling companies.

Cast your mind back to when Skoda was the butt of jokes. A marketing campaign that confronted the car’s image problem was responsible for increasing sales and creating the first-ever waiting list for new Skoda vehicles in the UK. It was the same story at Honda, where, until a few years ago, the brand was beloved only by the blue-rinse brigade. Some energetic and colourful marketing ideas helped to contemporise the cars and boost the bottom line.

Considering the impact that marketing can make on sales, it’s puzzling that marketing directors are still woefully under-represented at board level. Only a handful of the top 100 power marketers, as ranked by Marketing, have boardroom status. One of the oft-cited reasons is that marketing directors tend to leave early: their average tenure is around two years, compared to four for finance directors.

Yet independent brand valuation consultancy, Brand Finance, estimates that brands account for, on average, 28 per cent of companies’ total intangible value. In certain sectors, such as apparel, average brand value can be more than two-fifths of a company’s entire market value.

Successful marketing is about connecting consumers to a particular product or service, encouraging them not only to stay loyal to it, but also to recommend it. This, in turn, builds brands which are corporate assets for shareholders and which are fluid enough to innovate (the Virgin franchise), flexible enough to extend into different areas (Tesco mobile, Sainsbury’s finance) and can develop future cash flow (Apple). This is particularly crucial as, according to Deloitte, 50 per cent of share price value is based on the perception of future growth.

That Deloitte survey, Marketing in 3D, also showed that only 14 per cent of CFOs strongly agreed that the role of marketing versus the role of the marketing department is understood – yet these are the very people marketers need to befriend if they want their discipline to be seen as a growth-driver. As well as improving the image of brands, marketers might benefit from giving themselves – and their role in business – a makeover, too.