First, a fact: The way a business operates — customer service, for example, or delivery, or sourcing, or employee training and incentives — can communicate a great deal to consumers. Everything communicates.
We wrote not so long ago about implications of this fact for brands themselves, offering five catalysts for recognizing it and doing something about it through their IMC process.
But there are implications for us — the marketers within the agencies that service those brands — as well.
Because if we are expert communicators hired to give advice to brands, and if a brand’s business operations do indeed communicate a great deal to consumers, then by the transitive property, agencies need to be prepared to offer an informed point of view on how operations can better communicate to a given audience.
But the marketing industry is, by and large, unable to do so.
There are reasons why. Client organizations are (largely) siloed places, where the lady who sources materials for the product in question doesn’t talk with the CRM guy. Even more rarely will they work to integrate their respective efforts.
On our side, agency structures are (largely) mirrors of client structures, with each agency growing a up around a specific channel or discipline. (See Jonah Bloom’s plea to not create yet another silo for social media.)
Folks at agencies do not think outside their particular discipline because there is no business incentive to do so. The structure they work in does not encourage it. In fact, I might argue that it actively discourages it.
All to say, agency business structures themselves have to change before we as an industry are able to affect any kind of change beyond what is traditionally defined as “marketing.”
In other words, a brand’s business operations will continue to communicate a great deal to consumers, but it will only be in the rarest of cases that anyone at a standard-issue agency will be able to do anything about it, beyond watch it happen from the sidelines, of course.
[photo of silos by sightclutter]
[x-posted from House of Naked]
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