Sometimes This Stuff Gives Me A Headache

Maybe I woke up on the wrong side of the bed today, but I need some honest feedback and a little bit of help from my friends.

My despondence rests primarily on my shoulders, as I subscribe to anything and everything that can help me become a better consultant so that my clients benefit from that knowledge. But sometimes this stuff gives me a headache.

Take a recent article in CMO Magazine called Top 10 Marketing Processes for the 21st Century by Gartner Research Analysts Claudio Marcus and Kimberly Collins. Now I'm sure Claudio and Kimberly are both very smart and probably nice people who just want to do their jobs as well as possible. But by the time I finished the article, my head was spinning. Take the lead for example:

What You Need To Know

“Although traditional value-added marketing processes will continue to play a role in the evolution of the marketing function, marketers need to focus their attention on new processes and capabilities. Enterprises must find time to develop and master more-advanced marketing processes by improving the efficiency of the marketing function, and by shifting resources to be better aligned and to produce greater value. By 2007, marketers that devote at least 50 percent of their time to advanced, customer-centric marketing processes and capabilities will achieve marketing return on investment that is at least 30 percent greater than that of their peers, who lack such emphasis (0.8 probability)."

Does anyone other than me think this is obvious and could have been said in 10 words or less? We need to be customer-centric. Who doesn't get that? As I said in my first article here, my long-departed Sicilian grandmother owned and operated a family Italian Market on Church Street in New Britain, Conn., nearly a century ago. She didn't know a thing about marketing, but she knew that if her customers weren't happy with the store, she would go out of business.

And that takes me back to my headache regarding the article. The authors than use hundreds of words to share their "Strategic Planning Assumption(s)." To be honest, at this point I couldn't take it anymore. Sure, there is some interesting data, but anyone who is a CMO who doesn't get this and needs this article first shouldn't be a CMO and second isn't going to be able to use this information to change the course of the ship he or she is steering.

Hey, dude or dudette! It is about the "who" not the "what." It is about people, not products, services and assumptions. If we work in marketing, shouldn't we know this?

Read the article for yourself, and the dozens more that will be printed over the next year. Is this how we should be spending our time? Learning the obvious. Maybe some of us need a career change.

Okay, help me out here. Where am I going wrong? What is my problem? This headache is long past being medicated. I need you to set me straight.