November 24, 2006
the marketing by committee manifesto
Chris Houchens sent me this rather amusing marketing manifesto, based on something he wrote a while ago:
“Marketing by Committee”
If one person can produce ineffective crappy marketing, imagine what a committee can do.
Too many companies have a marketing committee to help brainstorm and provide input for the organization’s marketing department. Management feels that this allows employees to “be involved” in marketing.
If you want everyone to sit around and feel good about themselves while complaining about things they don’t like, a marketing committee is a fabulous idea.
Why don’t you have an office supply committee to pick out the colors of pens you order? How about an accounting committee to help figure out where the credits and debits are posted? Or even better, what about a human resources committee to help decide who is hired and fired?
Even if your committee is full of intelligent, creative people, the great ideas are lost. Committees, by nature, are full of compromises so solutions from a committee are usually watered down versions of the original. Marketing by committee leads to lots of bad ideas and poorly thought out plans. Instead of bold strokes from the marketing brush, you get a wall of beige.
This is not to say that the marketing department should be sitting on the mountaintop handing down dogma to the rest of the company. A good marketer in a company will already be engaging other departments about their needs and concerns. Good marketers will always have an ear to the ground about what the feel of the company is.
Hopefully, you hired the people in the marketing department because they’re good marketers who know how to market. Let them do it.
Amusing is good. I like amusing.
[gapingvoid manifesto submission guidelines are here.][Manifesto archive is here.]
A favorite quote of mine is from Bill Cosby: “I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is to try to please everyone.”
I could not agree with your manifesto more!
Thanks for the post, Hugh.
Hugh -
Are you sure this is meant to be amusing???
When I was in business school back in the late eighties, the academics spent a tremendous amount of time teaching “the wisdom of teams”. Of course, the word “team” was, and is, just a trendy term for committee. Groups and teams were glorified and the individual was thought of as a terribly old-school idea.
Question: Could a group/team/committee have developed your marketing ideas?
Back then, I believe that much of this nonsense was inspired by the success of the Japanese in the global market and the belief, by many, that we had to emulate all things Japanese if we were going to remain competitive, or even relevant.
I don’t know if they continue to teach this, but it certainly led to uncountable beige enterprises.
And today, those lofty company marketing teams have to compete with some lone marketing guy in, say, ah, Cumbria? Gosh, I wonder who to bet on?!
“None of us is as dumb as all of us.”
So is marketing better done collaboratively or not? Does it matter on who is doing the collaboration? Is it like everything else and it’s a little of both; one guy can come up with a great idea as often as an ok idea is coached up to a great idea?
I read someplace…
“a Camel is a horse designed by a committee”.