Marketing drawbacks

Suddenly I have the mood to write about marketing. Indeed, marketing is not my first choice since I take more interest in writing about politics or organization management. However, since marketing is important for business life as I have experienced it at the moment, I would like to discuss about it. Most of knowledge I use here is not new, not invented by me and can be found in business textbooks. Most of the problems here is not new to experienced marketers but so far as I have been they do not resolve to deal with them. Most of the recommendations here may be known by experienced managers but they do not resolve to implement them.

Marketing drawbacks mentioned herein are not caused by external forces but internal ones. First I try to make it as general as philosophy but then I realize by doing that I can make this blog as long as a 500 page book so I brought it down to to almost only functional level. However, the failure can not be blamed on staffs but only management; thus, functional level from managerial perspectives. They are cultural people issue, communication and resource allocation.

People issue

Based on the Balanced Scorecard order, people are the root of any strategy and action plan of the organization. Due to the fact that most organizations do not face planning problem but implementing one and human are the starters and implementers of all whatever plans, people issue is the most critical marketing constraint.

Firstly, the culture of Vietnam esp the learned classes of the society contains conflict aversion and risk-aversion. Management have the tendency to keep employees longer though they are not well functional particularly the "loyal employees".

Most of the marketing staffs in junior levels do not really understand fully regarding marketing and their definition is only limited to promotion and price. However, as we know so far in marketing practices, only by delivering value to customers in a sustainable manners shall the organization remains its competitive advantage on the market. So the common practice is to reduce price and adding by the rise of many coupon websites such as cungmua.com or muachung.com, the idea of offering cheaper becomes the ideal way to compete. Surely we know that it's not since it shall weaken the internal strength of the company and be very unsustainable (this is not mentioning the extreme case of some leading retailers or manufacturers).

Besides the poor practice of competing on the market, most marketing staffs in Vietnam choose to focus internally rather than externally. Marketing games when simplified only contains the three big players which are customer, competitor and organization. I have experienced many marketing people apply the proportion of 10/40/50 out of total 100 for the three big players respectively. They focus much just a little on what customers think and feel. What they try to do it to outbeat the competitors with "more effective" communications and "better" product. And "more effective" and "better" are most of the time from their own definition not from customer's.

Communication

This is about the internal communication which is a part of internal marketing. Marketing activities must be performed by all of the staffs in the organizations and the management and marketing must communicate the strategies as long as plans to all the staffs. However, so far as I have seen, many organizations separate marketing from accounting, marketing from operations...etc.

For manufacturing it is a more simple story since the product is intangible and in many cases the manufacturing and accounting staffs do not directly interact with the customers. However, if they do not have the marketing mindsets, their performances are not customer-oriented, there will be points in their process not aligning with the marketing strategies and plans. That creates loopholes and the more intensive the lack of communication is the more serious problems the organization shall have.

For services, it's quite plain. If the receptionist of a hotel does not know what characteristics associated with the organizational culture and brand are, the inconsistency soon appears. Customers who find themselves in a luxury hotel talking to a lousy receptionist shall not enjoy the lodging there. The extent is be different from case to case depending on the importance of the touch-points to the emotional and physical utilities of the customers.

Genuinely, there is a huge lack of communication or just taking it for granted in VN organizations.

Resource allocation

The drawbacks in resource allocation come from the lack of knowledge or prudent consideration of marketing in organization. The allocation of budget for marketing bases on the direct results and sales department therefore takes it all. The lack of budget allocation skills results in the unsuccessful implementation of the marketing plans (or maybe they are wrong from the beginning when choosing which to do and how to do it)

Not only with the money, the human resource allocation for marketing campaigns creates perfectly worse situation. The more integrated the departments of organizations are, the worse it will be. Since Vietnamese tend to live in introvert and focusing group, the connection between departments in daily basis is a problem itself let alone special projects and plans. Therefore, the allocation of human resource is seldom sufficient to the marketing objective.

The three discussed points distort and make the marketing activities ineffective.