ABSTRACT
I am honored by the opportunity to add my two cents to this ritual of existential angst that marketing celebrates periodically-over a span of at least thirty years and counting, in my experience.
It strikes me as bizarre that, just as companies are beginning seriously to confront the issues of discovering and coproducing value with customers, the marketing function is increasingly focused on justifying its existence. The marketing concept, now a half-century old, is becoming the business concept. But marketing departments, the natural home of customer-centric knowledge and initiatives, seem to have largely devolved into a sales support function-and an expensive one at that. One chief executive officer recently discovered that his marketing department, having outsourced most of the real work of advertising and communications, was still spending twothirds of its budget internally! Unable to imagine what possible value was being created by an internal staff that didn’t actually do anything, he immediately simplified marketing’s problem of justifying itself by reducing the marketing budget by 50 percent.
