"Chicken Little" Marketing - The Necessary Role of a Whistle Blower

In my first job in client side advertising, I was fortunate to report to a really great boss. Experienced, smart, open to ideas and very supportive to her team. However, she had a nasty habit of always going negative when evaluating creative or promotional ideas. The impact on the creative team was palpable, and her ‘Debbie Downer’ act was a bit tiresome to all; yet no one ever called her on it. I finally screwed up my courage to raise the issue with her. Her response was immediate, direct and frankly surprisingly honest. With absolutely no offense taken, she replied “Oh, that’s my AT&T PR training kicking in. We learned to look for the worst thing that could happen, and then work backwards! That helped us prepare to deal with a reporters call in a crisis. ” .... Like if a on-duty repairmen got drunk and hit a school bus with his phone company truck. Or a customer was electrocuted because the line was not grounded improperly…and so on.

Fortunately, most folks are able to operate in a bit more optimistic and positive mode. However, there are times when marketers should and must be the devil’s advocate. 2010 provided us some good examples where marketers as the brand protector and customer advocate should have been more vocal and aggressive. I certainly have no inside knowledge of the meetings at Apple, BP or Toyota, but someone senior in marketing must have been consulted or engaged in a way that should have improved the manner in which things played out.

No, marketers could not fix the design issues or outsourcing plan that Toyota utilized for its accelerator assembly. and, Marketing has a limited role in the safety plans of energy exploration. But they certainly DO have responsibility for the communication (marketing and media) elements of a crisis management situation. These plans for the “what ifs” in their industries should have been well developed and clearly defined with the who, what where, when and how laid out. Neither BP nor Toyota showed any glimpse of being effectively prepared. Being non US multi-national corporations made matters even worse when the local management was thrust into the spotlight as the point person, armed with less than urgent and transparent communication. We can also assume that the corporate teams in Japan and UK handling marketing and communication issues misread the US reaction, both media and public.

The Apple situation is more more troubling, because they have proven to be such savvy and on target with their marketing instincts. It is clear that the iPhone antenna issue was known well before product launch. Their initial public protests and bluster after the issue surfaced were ineffective and weakly worded, reflecting how poorly prepared they were. The decision to provide free ‘bumpers’ was a good plan B, but at great cost in added expense, but more importantly in brand esteem damage. It revealed Apple to be just like the 'other' tech companies - rushing a product to market, for no apparent good reason. In hindsight, had they initially given away the ‘bumper’, with a mildly worded warning about antenna performance without it, they would have suffered no ill effects.

So how did all these situations go so badly? I surmise it is deeply rooted in the secondary role that marketing continues to play in most companies today. Product and financial types are generally heading most corporations, with a primary emphasis on numbers. Despite the rise of the CMO function (Read my post of 9 May 2009 on CMOs), marketing is still not give a proper place at the senior strategic planning table. Who is at blame for that? Sadly marketers largely are.

Newly minted CMOs tend to focus too heavily on low hanging fruit and making wildly unrealistic projections, without building a solid base of strategic understanding and supporters. This pattern of reckless management has led to short CMO tenure, reinforced views of the practice of marketing and some broken glass that the brand and department have to live with - new CMO = new agencies + unfinished initiatives = demoralized people.

Because marketing is not valued as a business planning function, other departments associate the ‘fun’ stuff with us – ads, posters, tchotchkes. Shame on us for allowing this perception to linger. There’s an old saying about ‘marketing the marketing’, well it is true and very necessary. Just don’t stop at the creative stuff. Speak from a strategic perspective, with objectives, goals and strategies, backed up by measurement plans. Be prepared to demonstrate the contribution marketing programs make to the business in generating demand, protecting revenue and building the brand.

Marketing staff often feel uncomfortable in playing the necessary role to prevent such disasters as Apple, BP & Toyota endured. Sure, the whistle blower role is not an easy one to adopt and fulfill, sorta like being the skunk at a picnic. You have to be very sure of your facts and have strong and well founded convictions to be the naysayer. Merely mentioning "brand protection" is not sufficient, in fact that generalized statement may be more damaging, given very few understand or embrace it.

But, speaking up and avoiding damage to the brand, while painful in the short run, is a whole lot easier than cleaning up the mess afterward.