Re: Gibson’s got a new CFO and the CEO installment in the Saving Gibson series
Re: Gibson’s got a new CFO and the CEO installment in the Saving Gibson series
"I've been told that Gibson only has 2 marketing people- if true, there's no way they're doing this well."
Big, in house marketing departments are not necessarily good...out sourcing to firms that have the resources and tools is a more practical and effective way to go...hopefully Gibson does have a "Madison Avenue" group on board...if not, you are correct...no way they will make a go of it...they are flying blind...
Ah Fred, good, good point! I’m going way long on this one!
It's true that too big isn't good, but too little is often a very big problem-
I was the CMO for one of the first DAW mfgs in the 80s - 8 digit revenue- We could barely handle the work with 3 in marketing and this was before CRM, Marketing Automation and heavy social.
Gibson has 9 digit revenue and benchmarks tell us they should be spending approximately $25m on marketing and would average 8-15 marketing employees.
It is true that outsourcing can reduce costs, but it can also increase costs- The management and overhead gets missed- RFPs, contracts, and knowledge transfer take up a lot of resources-
Consider the marketing roles for a small/mid size-
• Big picture, manager, strategist- Interaction with management and sales
• Market and competitive, voice of the customer, quality and customer service research
• Analytics, CRM and marketing automation
• Product Marketing
• Positioning and brand development
• PR, Media, analysts, internal messaging
• Sales training, internal roll outs and supporting collateral
• Channels, partners and event management
• Advertising
• Content creation- Blogs, video, and lots and lots of writing
• Creative-Artwork, layouts, web pages
• Technology management (this may live in IT or not depending on the org)
CMO, Strategy, Positioning, Research and Product Marketing are where the innovation happens, so unless they outsource all of marketing, they almost have to be internal and would cover at least 2 positions.
So that leaves 9 or so major functions that need to be outsourced, directed, inputs and outputs coordinated and utilized and performance measured.
Let’s believe we have super marketing folks and they can manage 3 functions a piece for a total of 3 managers of outsourced marketing. And add in someone for contracts, or increase the load on a contracts department.
That gives us a
barebones total of 5-6 in marketing and it's still not realistic- Some of this work will have to be internal due to the nature of how the company is organized, which means that some of them are generating internal product and don’t have time to supervise external.
And in a way, this minimal thinking is the opposite of how Gibson needs to be thinking to get out of crisis mode- They should be asking:
- How do we acquire good Voice of the customer data? How much does that cost, how many people do we need, is there anyone already doing this somewhere else and how much can we outsource?
- How do we monitor user experience, build references, incent sales and dealers to work together to provide the right level of value and a high quality experience? Same questions about resources to do this.
- Last but not least, do we live in a competitive environment where we need a Chief Customer Officer to bring the customer perspective to balance finance, product and operations decisions? (we argue yes for this one in the next edition
Funding for these, and many more similar questions (especially process development), should have been one of the highest priorities as they bang out a new plan- Gibson hasn’t been good at this stuff and they need to get really efficient if they want to stay in the mass market and that takes a lot of marketing experience.
I
t will be interesting to see if they have already figured this out, if they bring in management that figures this out, or if they try to continue to make it with “Old School Marketing”.
Whew, long one- You've got a lot of change management background- what do you think?
