The Manifesto for Effective Marketing

The most rewarding part of my entrepreneurial career has been talking to CEOs or business leaders of different companies. It has become clear that marketing in its current form can be an area that many business leaders find difficult to understand, or a "black box". This was also my assumption when I set out to start a business.

The discussions and my own reflections have resulted in my company manifesto, which aims to summarise the goals I am trying to achieve in my work. Here you are!

Marketing must be an integral part of a company's business.

If marketing is its own silo, it can easily start to flow in a direction that is irrelevant to a company's business. When marketing and sales are a seamless commercial team, the business has the best chance of creating success.

Modern marketing is not an end in itself, but effective marketing is.

It's trendy to do the hottest or newest form of marketing, but it doesn't guarantee results. The core mission of marketing is not to deliver entertainment, stories or the latest technological marvel. Instead, it is to deliver business growth, and the above methods can sometimes help if they can be proven.

Marketing's job is to deliver growth for your business, and that means euros.

If marketing cannot crystallise how resources spent translate into euros, even in the medium term, it is worth having a very constructive debate on the subject. Marketing's job is to generate sales - not necessarily always today, but not "sometime in the future" either. Marketing is the engine of growth.

Marketing needs to understand the customer, but also the business.

In many companies, marketing is focused on understanding the customer. This is important - it's the customer's decisions that ultimately bring in the money. But at the same time, you need to understand the logic of your own business. If marketing doesn't take enough interest in this, the work it does will be wasted. The more marketing understands about economics and sales, the better.

Business leaders need to understand the state of their company's marketing.

Marketing must not become a sales assistant or an island that no one understands or is allowed to criticise. Management must have a clear vision of what marketing does and how it adds value to the company. Without this vision, investment in marketing can be turned into an expense and some of the money put into a lottery, for example.

If you are interested in discussing the above topics for your company, please contact us. ossi@ahtoadvisory.fi or 0400 833 883.