When “marketing” becomes an action verb...

Industrial leaders know manufacturing when they see it. It’s a process in motion, something you can measure, understand and improve. Manufacturing is an action verb, it is what your company was founded to do.  

Then there’s marketing.

For so many small to mid-size manufacturers, marketing is not an action verb. Marketing doesn’t at all perform or look like your manufacturing operations. Its pieces are not engineered in three-dimensional space, you can’t get your hands on it to make it work right, to maybe replace the old manual hand wheel with a five-axes CNC package.

That’s not to say marketing is entirely elusive. “Marketing” is a title on at least one business card in the company. In fact, you may have several folks with product marketing in their titles. And you know exactly where to find them. Marketing is down the hall across from sales. You know where marketing is. You just don’t know where it’s going.

For many manufacturers, marketing is not at all like sales.

Sales is an action verb. Marketing is too often a noun. Your sales manager reminds you of this all the time and every once in a while, you check it out. You walk down the hall, open the door to the sales office and the sales people are out selling. But every time you go down the hall into the “marcom” office what do you see? You see a lot of big ideas swirling around, all seemingly going nowhere.

When marketing and branding become action verbs, they will perform in ways sales cannot − by building new sales opportunities and building new market share.

When marketing and branding becomes action verbs, knowledge management and content development will also become action verbs. So will web marketing, social media, event marketing, editor relations and even advertising.

When marketing and branding bring all of these disciplines together, you can see what an engineered marketing communication program looks like. You can put your hands on it, tweak the controls and improve on it.

When your marketing and branding become action verbs, your business will thrive.

jb

www.centrifuge-now.com