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February 2009
Interregna in conversation with Tim Ambler
Tim Ambler is a Senior Fellow at the London Business School. He has spent most of his career in marketing and management; including serving as Joint Managing Director of International Distillers & Vintners, now part of Diageo plc. His research specialises in dynamic marketing techniques, advertising and the evaluation of marketing plans and performance. He also works on regulatory issues across the UK and EU and is a highly published author in his field.
Following a recent speaking engagement entitled “The Past, Present and Future of Marketing”, Interregna caught up with Ambler to see what interim managers might have to offer the discipline.
Marketing: the baby of business
Ambler says that if you ask for a history of marketing, it will by definition be a short one. “If you look back 40 years, hardly any firms had a marketing department at all. Those very few that did were in FMCG or perhaps drinks companies, and any marketing was essentially done by advertising agencies. It was not perceived as a separate discipline at all. Marketing has evolved only in very recent times.”
 “Unfortunately, it is therefore not particularly well defined. If an interim candidate takes a post as a temporary finance director, there’s not going to be much doubt what they are going to have to do for their money. Yet, if an interim candidate takes a post as a temporary marketing director, the first thing they need to do will be to ask what the job involves! In one company, marketing might include responsibility for pricing, for example; in another, pricing may be entirely outside the marketer’s remit. Ambler maintains that this blurred job description is true right up to FTSE100 corporate giants.
“Because the sophistication of boards as to the marketing role varies so much, all sorts of odd jobs end up on the marketing manager’s plate. An interim in any role should start by asking questions, but an interim marketing manager can comfortably open with: ‘what is this job, what do you expect me to do, and how will you judge my success?’”
That Q&A process isn’t just about establishing a job description: as a new broom, it’s also the interim marketer’s job to bring to the attention of management all sorts of things they might not have noticed; as Ambler put it, "If your car hasn't been cleaned in a while, it's not you that notices it, it's everyone else."
A definition for today
Is there really such an ignorance in business about the role of marketing? Ambler quotes a piece of research he conducted not so long ago, in which midsize companies were sent a survey asking about their marketing activities. Over two thirds claimed not to do any marketing at all. Ambler says “Of course, they are doing marketing – every business does – but because they don’t understand what it is, they claim not to be doing any.”
Don’t worry: definitions of marketing abound. Ambler’s definition is nothing to do with segmentation, research or anything else in the marketing toolkit. He defines marketing as "’the sourcing and harvesting of cashflow.’ It's what every organisation has to do to stay alive. If you don't have cashflow, you're dead in the water, and marketing is a discipline that hunts down cashflow.”
Marketing is also a discipline which is changing fast. For at least two decades, you could comfortably predict the leaders in marketing innovation and results: great names like Procter & Gamble or Mars. However, an evolving media landscape is changing the rules, and best practice can be found in unlikely places: “Interestingly some of the private equity firms are pretty smart”, says Ambler. “Birds Eye, for example, was acquired from Unilever – certainly one of the companies sitting at marketing’s top table for the past fifty years. Yet, its new private equity owners seem to have been more successful in understanding the markets for the brands they acquired.”
Opportunities for interims to make an impact
Ambler says that marketing is a uniquely high-turnover discipline, and not necessarily for all the right reasons. “Of board-level jobs; Operations Director, HR Director etc.; the role of Marketing Director has demonstrably the highest turnover,” he says. He puts this down to a lack of communication (in both directions) between Marketing Directors and CEOs, which generates false expectations on both sides which cannot be met. “The average longevity in the role is around two years.” This, of course, presents many opportunities to interim marketing specialists who can bring experience to the post.
Never has such experience been more valuable. Ambler says the key pressure is time. “In the 1960’s, a Marketing Manager might have had six suppliers – an ad agency, research house and so forth. Today, he or she will have sixty. The media mix is broader, the internet has come along, and all these trends towards diffusion create complexity. Just as the consumer in a supermarket today has vastly more choices than forty years ago, so the marketer is faced with the same problem.”
Keep it simple
However, that doesn’t mean that marketers require a finger in every pie. Indeed, Ambler is at pains to point out that avoiding complexity is at the heart of good marketing. “No Marketing Director on a temporary assignment should mess around with long-term fundamentals – changing the packaging or sacking the ad agency – because he’s only there for a while. There are always exceptions where real dramas get in the way, but as a rule an interim should leave well alone. The politician’s urge to tinker is not one which should be shared by marketers.”
“What the interim Marketing Manager definitely can do, perhaps more so than in any other role, is to ‘get rid of the brushwood’. Because of the complexity of modern marketing, there’s always a lot of stuff which gets done which doesn’t really matter. There are all sorts of niche campaigns which don’t demonstrate any real value, but which eat up resources, and are probably getting in the way. It would do the company a big favour for an interim to clear all these extraneous activities out; leaving in place just those activities which really matter. When a permanent incumbent is recruited, they should be grateful to be met by a concise, rational and economical marketing department.”
Marketing: the future
What might the future of marketing look like? Ambler has one wish; although we suspect this is one shared by most specialist disciplines: “I would hope to see the marketing function become better integrated with the rest of the corporate machinery. Marketing is fundamental – as I said above, it generates cashflow, the lifeblood of the business – and yet marketing is sometimes seen as a black art and therefore leads too much of a separate existence.” Marketing is clearly the precocious child of the corporate family; perhaps with those troublesome teenage years out of the way, the future of marketing will be a rewarding maturity.
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