Marketing: the critical skill - column

Marketing: The critical skill

When the concept of marketing came into vogue after World War II, an interesting switch became common in company organization charts: The "Sales director" became the "Marketing director." Because this person (and it was almost always a man in those days) received no real education about the vast differences in responsibilities that this new title implied, he naturally continued to do his job as the sales director--for these were the duties he understood. So much for the marketing concept, which did not flower until properly trained people were put into place.

In the magazine business, this switch in titles has yet to take place. "Advertising sales director" continues to designate the person who should be the top marketing thinker in the organization. This inflexibility on titles in the magazine business may have been a harbinger of things to come, for in fact, magazines were very slow to understand marketing. And long after their major advertising customers were deeply engaged in the new thinking, magazines continued to "sell" rather than "market" themselves.

I was a firsthand witness. In the 1950s, first with a consumer products company and then with a major advertising agency, I had representatives of the country's top magazines call on me. Most of them knew their products well and, of course, they were masters of charm, of the elegant luncheon or dinner, and the leisurely golf game at some historic site.

But interestingly enough, no one ever asked what my client was trying to accomplish or what his objectives were, or asked about the profile of his customers. Many times I asked the representatives point blank if they would like to learn these things, but all seemed content to describe their magazines in detail and leave the rest to us.

During the 1960s and 1970s, and so far in the 1980s, leading publishers have sought to change this orientation of salespeople. To an extent, they have been successful. But this pursuit is one in which you never fully succeed--and there are signs today of some slippage. That is why it's instructive to spend some time on the basics of the marketing concept as it applies to magazines.

Marketing to win

A story on Sports Illustrated some years ago covered, in great detail, the Green Bay Packers' championship victory. One particular quote from Coach Vince Lombardi sticks in my mind. This is not verbatim, but the essence of the message was this: People try to get very fancy about football, but at Green Bay we believe that if you block and tackle better than your opponents, you win championships.

This is a statement that fits magazine selling. The blocking and tackling have to do with the fundamentals of a market oriented viewpoint. The market must be the starting point. One must understand the customer's business and what he or she is trying to accomplish with his communications program before you can devise an effective strategy for your magazine with this customer. It sounds very simple, yet the people who have mastered this discipline have risen to the very top of the business.

To clarify this discussion, let me trace a bit of magazine history to help explain why the marketing approach was at first an alien thought to magazine salespeople. Time was launched in 1923, and although it had its growing pains, it was a genuinely new product and quickly began to succeed. Quite naturally, the journalists who created the product, the circulators who marketed it to readers, and the advertising people who sold Time to advertisers were a tightly knit, small group, enchanted by this new idea. Therefore, it was logical that Time would be sold first on the basis of knowing the product, and second, of knowing the right decision makers to contact.

Fortune was started in 1929; Life the weekly in 1936; and Sports Illustrated in 1954. Each was an authentic new product idea, the essential ingredient of the Time Inc. strategy of having a quality product attract quality readers who can be sold at premium prices to advertisers. This history of Time Inc.'s original four consumer magazines quite clearly describes an organization certain to be product oriented--and indeed, until the late 1950s or early 1960s, that is precisely what it was, and very successfully so.

But some dramatic things had begun happening in the communications world that changed the market environment. Television began to hurt Life--and it was no longer enough just to know your product well. It became crucial to understand a customer's business and to recommend communications packages, rather than simply tell them all about Life and let them find their own solutions as to how best to use the magazine. The customer increasingly was choosing television--not because television sold itself in a sophisticated way, but because the new medium had turned the tables on magazines with its glamour, its sight and sound, its proximity to the "stars." Television could adopt the product-oriented approach and succeed without investing all the time, effort and intelligence required by the marketing approach.

Life the weekly was not able to survive the mass defections of consumer product advertisers to television. Even though the Life sales staff in this period of desperate competition became as professional a group of market-oriented salespeople as I have ever observed, the sex appeal of the new medium was irresistible to too many advertisers and their agencies, too easy to justify, too seductive to resist.

Learning from experience

The Life experience was a sobering but most valuable lesson not only for Time Inc., but for all perceptive magazine people. One is reminded of a quote often attributed to Earl Weaver, who managed the Baltimore Orioles with some considerable success: "You are never as good as you look when you're winning, and never as bad as you appear while losing." When Life was hot, it could not accommodate all of its advertisers. When the market turned to television, Life was the same product, perhaps even better (it certainly had a more competent staff and a strong circulation story), and yet the end of what had been one of America's most important information and entertainment vehicles for 36 years came sadly in 1972. [Life is succeeding today as a monthly.]

So magazine people looked for lessons. And one clear signal for the advertising sales side was that you must not wait for some disastrous change to take place in the marketplace; you must not rest on your laurels believing that this way of marketing your product has succeeded very nicely, so why change it. You must keep your eye constantly on your customers and on product developments, and start adjusting before disaster strikes.

On application of this principle played itself out in the controversy that grew up between personal selling and numbers selling, emotional appeals versus the facts. The wise concluded that this is not an either/or question. One must have all these resources at his or her command. And if you don't have the resources, you better invent them. The intelligence work must get better.

One of the more sophisticated responses to discontinuity in the marketplace was the concept of sales planning, which emerged in the mid-1960s. Historically, salespeople were assigned accounts, they estimated their business prospects, conferred with their managers from time to time (usually when the business was about to be lost), and were pretty much left to their own devices to run this "small" business.

Sales planning introduced more control while attempting not to inhibit individuality or creativity across a heterogeneous sales staff. Each salesperson's account list was analyzed, and a small group of key accounts was identified. The salesperson was then asked to write a marketing plan for these crucial accounts. Not a huge document, not endless wandering prose, but, quite simply, where have we been with this account, where do we hope to take them, and how is this to be accomplished? Basic requirements were customer knowledge, specific data on decision makers and an understanding of the level at which they could be approached, the timing of the customer's buying process, and what resources at the magazine would be required.

Parallel to the sales planning process were changes that were required in the organization. Now there was a great need for the advertising director to think and act like a marketing director. Traditionally, the best salesperson eventually became sales director, and in fact continued to behave like the best salesperson. Now the theory evolved that, although the sales director must keep in touch with the market and must participate wherever "silver bullet" sales situations required, his principal preoccupations should be with where the organization should be heading, with what resources are required to support the staff under today's market conditions, and with identifying what kind of talent is appropriate on both the line and the staff sides.

To this day, the authentic advertising director is a rare bird. I have worked with precious few over 35 years on all three sides of the business. There is an almost irresistible desire to spend the day making phone calls, going on routine sales calls, attending routine luncheons and sitting in on meetings that have to do with details, not planning. There is instant gratification in getting on the train at night and telling a friend how many calls you took today, how many meetings you attended, how many sales problems you solved in person, how many memos, sales letters and promotion pieces you were finally able to read. If only a small voice could say, "I'm sorry, none of that counts. You have people to do all those things. And as long as they see you willing to do their work, not only will they let you, but when they become sales directors, they'll conduct themselves exactly the same way."

The correct questions for a sales director are more like these: Do we have a clear definition of our magazine, of its position in the marketplace? Do we know who our competitors are? Do we know why we lose business and why we get business? Are our salespeople the best ones to execute this magazine's purchase proposition? How strong is our staff support in easing the salespeople's jobs, in providing primary and secondary research, in helping utilize information imaginatively to produce selling propositions?

Those are questions directly involved with the sales director's own organization. But he or she should be addressing an entirely different series of questions to his or her peers in the magazine management team: Is the publisher providing sales with the type of promotion that helps sell advertising? Are the circulators, in seeking to enhance their circulation net performance, selling the magazine in non-quality ways and thus diluting the audience we are selling? What is the proper balance between circulation growth and rate increases? (And the sophisticated advertising director will not always automatically come down on the side of lower rate increases.)

The job is formidable. If done correctly, it is a responsibility that requires a great deal of thought. Therefore, it requires more solitude, which is antithetical to the instincts of any veteran salesperson. Don't get me wrong. We are not here recommending monastic habits. The sales director must stay out among the customers. But the crucial point that eludes most is that his or her role is not to sell the customers, but to learn from them about their company and industry in such a way that he or she can make intelligent decisions on the broader questions.

The savvy sales director has to give careful thought to the marketplace as it is evolving. Has the landscape changed in terms of who makes critical media decisions? There was a time when a coterie of senior media, account and creative people called the shots. But today's agencies and companies tend to be more like the Pentagon-- with layers upon layers of people who must be seen, many of whose importance it is difficult to determine. Constant observation, perhaps even research, may be required to get an accurate reading of who can buy advertising. This is a much more important subject to tackle than last week's sales letters or next week's party plans.

In today's fast business tempo, the person who succeeds, the one who can really make media decisions, who can buy advertising, needs useful information more than anything else. Advertisers and agencies must organize themselves to get the best information in the simplest form at the right time. They may love people, but the more successful they are, the less time they have for people--unless those people bring information they can use. When advertisers and agencies discover a magazine salesperson who consistently enlightens them, who does not waste their time, it does not matter that this person is outside their organizations: They have time.

Of course, producing information that customers can use requires the unglamorous, relentless digging depicted so well years ago by Sergeant Joe Friday in the "Dragnet" radio and television series--now revived as Yellow Pages advertisements. "The facts, give me the facts." You must know a company and its products before you can produce facts that relate to your magazine that will interest your customer.

We are talking here about a way of thinking--not a technique or gimmick --that is not natural if one has come up through selling. In many ways it has been the crossbreeding of people from the agency and client sides with magazine people that has helped the magazines make this transition. This way of thinking must proceed from a profound curiosity about what a prospect is really trying to accomplish, what targets he has in mind, how well his strategy is thought out. It requires a genuine feeling that you can help solve the problem and that you will be honest in how you help solve it. This builds a substantial relationship and will cause you to be identified as being among the few who contribute to helping the prospect do his or her job better. Business follows inevitably.

My basic training in this school of thought came under the guidance of a true marketing genius. He could not only see a long way down the road (and thus never spent much time looking back), but was a man who could also see around corners. He always approached a problem the same way-- from the customer's viewpoint. He taught us to avoid advocacy in the early stages, to be totally objective about the product or service we were trying to sell, and to put ourselves in the customer's shoes. It is a lesson I have never forgotten. And often it led me to listen carefully to advertisers and agencies. Instead of rejecting out of hand some radical departure they were proposing, I would study the suggestion, and on occasion find that theirs was a sound idea as to how to make my magazine more attractive to my customers.

This training came for me before I entered the magazine industry. I have often wondered how we can expect people who come directly into the magazine business, with no opportunity to learn firsthand how advertisers and agencies proceed to build an advertising program, to think back from the customer instinctively. Either they must be "naturals" or they must get proper instruction from within the organization.

Keep your priorities straight

To put it another way, identify the problem--and do not get mixed up in solutions prematurely. We all have an incredible ability to process new information while leaving our original assumptions intact. That is because we start solving before identifying--and it is just as deadly as starting your down swing in golf before you have completed the back swing. First the problem, the real problem, then you are ready to think creatively about the solution.

There is a story I've always liked about what can happen if you act too quickly, before you have properly identified the problem. A leading advertising agency conducted some research and found that 80 percent of the consumers of a leading alcoholic beverage drank this brand in cocktails. Excited by this research, the agency produced a series of beautiful four-color magazine spreads set on terraces in swish locations with handsome people, gorgeous clothes and great photography.

When the six months sales figures were in, the results were disastrous. The sales curve was in a fantastic decline. So the agency went back to the market and probed further. Alas, the original findings were correct, but they were partial findings. The missing piece of information revealed that, while it was true that 80 percent of the consumers drank this product in cocktails, the 20 percent who did not consumed 80 percent of the brand.

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