MARKETING EXCELLENCE VIA EDUCATION AND TRAINING

WHAT is Marketing? The word gets bandied around so loosely today it could be anything. Dictionaries have defined marketing as the act or process of buying and selling in a market, the commercial functions involved in transferring goods from producer to consumer, the total of activities involved in the transfer of goods from the producer or seller to the consumer or buyer, including advertising, shipping, storing, and selling (Random House and The American Heritage Dictionary) and so on.

While Marketing as a subject may have been taught at university level as early as 1910, it was only in the 70’s that Marketing began to be really practiced by modern business as part of the overall thrust of the organisation using a focus on customer needs and wants in order to drive growth and commercial success, replacing earlier orientations that suited the market and economic environments of their times.

According to the Mid-Term Review of the Eighth Malaysia Plan local firms need to improve their marketing capability, particularly to export markets when you see that multinational corporations (MNCs) are linked to a significant portion of exports, especially of manufactured goods…. local firms must enhance their marketing skills and develop new markets.

The government, understanding the importance of SMEs in the marketing of Malaysian goods and services, provided SMEs with RM50 million to help them improve their marketing capacity under the 2005 Budget, through programs, involving marketing strategies, merchandising and other relevant, value-adding activities, and a further RM100 million for enhancing packaging, design, and labelling capabilities.

How effectively those monies and subsequent support have been made use of, depends a great deal on how well Marketing is understood by SMEs. To help us in our exploration we sought the opinions of academics and practitioners beginning with their views on Marketing and Marketing Excellence.

The AMA Definition

Nottingham University’s Anita Chakrabarty, Univerisity Tunku Abdul Rahman’s Tan Boon In and Universiti Technology Mara’s Sofiah Abdul Rahman refer to the traditional definition adopted by the American Marketing Association (AMA) – “Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.”

According to Boon In, this definition is very comprehensive and is about the 4Ps (Product, Price, Place and Promotion) and not just about Promotion alone.

WHAT IS MARKETING EXCELLENCE?

A Continuous Process of Improvement

Dean of the School of Business at Curtin University of Technology Sarawak, Shamsul Kamariah Bt Abdullah says Marketing Excellence is, “a continuous quality improvement process – in this case quality improvement of the product offered – the value added to the product; just in time delivery and a clear communicated message.

Expressing Brand Essence

Marketing Excellence to Lee-Chong HO, Regional Principal Consultant of executive search firm ESP Worldwide whose specialisation includes the search for and placement of candidates for marketing positions, is the ability to showcase the true meaning of a brand to all its consumers, across below the line (BTL), above the line (ATL) and any other new media.

For Boon In Marketing Excellence is the same as branding excellence, company strategy excellence, and long term performance of both branding and company performance. “In my teaching,” he says, “I always stress that Marketing is not just advertising and promotion, neither is it just sales.”

Customer Orientation

Understanding Marketing Excellence, according to Ernest Cyril, Associate Professor and Deputy Dean at the Centre for Graduate Studies, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak requires an inate understanding of marketing itself and the company’s customer, and is about going all out to satisfy the customer. According to him, “everything in marketing must be customer-centric,” as it is the consumer who determines what is excellent or not.

Feedback And Change

Juliet Chan, Head of Marketing of HELP University College agrees. “Human beings are the barriers to Marketing Excellence, especially if they are not open to new ideas and suggestions!” she says.

Meeting Targets

Steve explains that to be truly excellent, Marketing has to be effective in meeting the objectives. “The objective is invariably to make people use or buy something more – the customer does not think in terms of Marketing Excellence, they think in terms of ‘I like that or don’t like that’ and ‘do I want to buy that?’” he says.

THE STATE OF MALAYSIA’S MARKETING PRACTICE

Where are Malaysian SMEs in terms of our use and practice of marketing?

The findings of Kee Cheng Guan’ study (The Four “X’s” SME Marketing Model: A Non-Technical Approach to Marketing for SMEs in Malaysia, 2008) reveal that while “SMEs in Malaysia do acknowledge the importance of marketing”, “most SMEs in Malaysia have a weak understanding of marketing which leads to the inability to take advantage of this essential tool.”

In March 2009, Malaysia External Trade Development Corporation (Matrade) CEO and Malaysia Effie Awards executive council chairman Datuk Noharuddin Nordin told The Edge, “The greatest weakness of Malaysian brands is the failure to communicate the quality they are capable of delivering, and the solution is effective marketing strategies.” (The Edge, March 10, 2009)

But is it really just our inability to communicate quality that is our greatest weakness or does the problem lie deeper than that? We turn to some experts for their take on the challenges and possible opportunities.

Collaboration Instead Of Competition

Shamsul Kamariah Bt Abdullah of Curtin University of Technology is positive and optimistic. “Local companies are now getting acknowledged from over the world,” she says but adds that local companies should take one step ahead and instead of seeing the ‘giants’ as competitors create ‘smart partnerships’ with them. “Today’s business is about collaborating with less competition unless there is a need,” enthuses Shamsul.

Segmentation And Customisation

Also upbeat is Head of the Marketing Programme at Universiti Malaysia Sabah, Azizi Abdul. He suggests one key opportunity area for improvement.

“Unlike previous traditional marketing practice, today’s environment requires marketers to design and formulate new strategies for each targeted group differently,” says Azizi. “This is because each group has unique needs and wants that must be fulfilled correctly.”

The Value Proposition

John Burbidge, CEO of Roicom says, “The quality-price equation is equally pertinent,” he adds and points to the success of Old Town Coffee & it’s geographical expansion which he attributes to a powerful value/convenience proposition rather than superiority of quality.

John suspects that most SMEs do not pay to employ marketing executives or consultancies because the boss probably believes he or she can do it themselves.

Customer Experience

Anita Chakrabarty, Assistant Professor of Marketing at Nottingham University Business School, says Malaysian companies have to buck up on creating, communicating and delivering value to customers with more emphasis on the long term and sustainable competitive advantages rather than being myopic and emphasising short term profit. Anita points out that we fail in delivering our promises providing consistency in our customer experience.

“In this respect, we have to say kudos to various public sector initiatives that have improved public sector service delivery, elevating customer experience,” she says. “However, this does not include the quality of internet services in the country!” she is quick to add.

The Internet

Nicholas Sze COO of Tigas Pharma believes that almost no one will deny the importance of marketing – especially relating to the classical 4 P’s, but the investment in marketing tends to be conservative he observes.

The Trading Mentality

“It’s hard for companies with a ‘trading’ mentality to think of modern marketing,” says Michael, who with a sigh adds, “if only they knew what it could do for them, if it was practised properly.”

“Now, most of them take their sales person from the back room and make him or her their marketing person – and they know squat!

Even though I’ve talked about branding – and most Malaysian companies think you have to be BIG to brand – it’s important to note that more than 70 percent of the world’s innovations have come from SME’s.

Not Using All The Tools They Can

One needs to consider how the message is coded, whether it is comprehensible to the target and whether a company listens to the response and provides feedback he notes.

Positioning is a tool in marketing that, in his view, is misunderstood. “One must understand how the consumer see’s our product in their mind, based on the various attributes of the product and consider how to place that product attribute in the mind of the consumer.” Volvo – safety. Proton – cheap.

Marketing Decisions

Differentiation is key. “If we do not develop a proper market and marketing strategy for a new market, whats the use of going out… we will most probably will die,” he continues.

Ernest Cyril illustrates this with an example. We want to sell fruit overseas, he says but no proper market and marketing strategy are done, and we end up competing on an ad hoc basis. “Look at Thailand and its fruit marketing,” he demonstrates. “You can get a thailand durian in Holland, Australia.. anywhere.”

THE MALAYSIAN SME NEEDS TO BUILD CONFIDENCE AND TRUST

Ms Oh Yoke Moi who is Programme Director for the Bachelor of Management (Marketing) programme at Taylor’s Business School, tells us about some of the shortcomings of the Malaysian SME and offers advice on how they can improve their chances of success in the increasingly competitive global marketplace.

Ignorance Is Bliss

One of the main reasons why the Malaysian firm isn’t doing as well as it can be doing is because they lack important information that can help them see things from the perspective of their customer. This lack of insight and information retards their ability to make sound marketing decisions and appears to be driven, either by shortsighteness or being overly singleminded about one factor to the detriment of other important factors.

“I believe most of the companies have been focusing on achieving high sales, sales growth for x%, or brands with perception of high quality, reliability and distinctiveness…. BUT they may have overlooked the following areas:

• Measuring customer retention by segment
• Measuring the real profitability of their top few accounts
• Unaware of customer satisfaction in terms of product quality, services, & distribution.”

It is clear that the company that wishes to succeed needs to create financial and human resources and set in place the systems that will allow them to do these things. And while the traditional businessman may balk at what can look like additional expense rather than the investments in future growth and profit that they are, there is always the option of outsourcing these to external specialists or even to academia.

Making Marketing Excellence Happen

Yoke Moi offers 10 ideas that Malaysian companies can exploit to better manage their companies’ marketing and marketing resources to help them get the most out of their marketing:

There should be strong marketing leadership that fully involves and ensures a change in their employees’ behaviour towards better business performance

• Use the right people for the right job – happy workers are more committed and productive workers
• Have clear corporate and marketing goals to provide clear direction
• Align company goals with measurable objectives and tactics
• Create fewer, bigger, stronger brands with wider distribution to fully utilise resources
• Shift from a ‘product innovation’ to a ‘customer-centric’ philosophy
• Have a budget for Marketing and build in accountability

Do not duplicate marketing activities. Instead have integrated marketing activities to create ‘one-voice’ to translate the positioning of the bigger brands across the marketing mix

Collaborate with other relevant business units or companies that help to create synergistic effects

Most importantly, there should be a marketing audit carried out periodically to measure effectiveness of marketing efforts

To these she adds three more ideas, this time about how academia can help to make it happen.

marketing practitioners. Academics and students can render research services to companies that need market information in making their decisions. This will also provide avenues for academics to keep track of the latest market developments and incorporate the information into their teaching. And, at the same time, students will get a feel of the way the real business world operates.

Academics’ research work should be more focused on the marketing operational aspects with the intention of suggesting solutions for marketing problems. E.g, we may apply marketing models to solve some business-related problems.

College or university syllabus should be more geared towards equipping students with expertise or skills needed at the work place. This will make our marketing courses more interesting and students will be more engaged in their study. This will definitely increase the employability of our students.

A MARKETING INDUSTRY FOR MALAYSIA

Just how seriously do we take marketing here in Malaysia? Sometimes it almost seems like anyone and everyone is an expert. I have heard horror stories from many practitioners of their experiences in meetings where “useful advice” or even instructions can come from people who have no education, training or experience in Marketing.

According to Chee Choy Chin, Chartered Marketer and Chairman of the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM), his organisation has been arguing its case to the boardroom through better training, professional qualifications and long term profesional development.

Chee Choy says that the CIM also believes that professional standards help add gravitas to the marketing world, add value to pay packets, and boost employability.

It is interesting, though, to take a look at some of the classified advertisements taken out in our local dailies shouting out marketing job vacancies for companies involved in diverse industires, among them healthcare, hospitality, tourism, property development, the motor trade, dining, retail and even education.

In many, if not most cases, the key requirement is experience or qualifications specific to that industry rather than education, training or experience in marketing.

Perhaps this is because marketing is not viewed as a critical, specialist skill.

After all marketing does not involve conducting surgery or building a house and so I suppose no one has died from a bad marketing decision. Marketers do not need to be certified the way accountants or auditors do.

It is rather sad that a marketer in one industry may therefore get tied down to that industry, not having the experience in another industry required to secure employment there. And yet, abroad, we see people like Steve Jobs, jumping from computers to head Coca Cola and doing a spanking good job there. Or my ex-colleague, the late Geoffrey Frost who did remarkable work at Nike and Motorola before he was taken from us, way too soon.

It is also rather sad that, because of this way of thinking, here, that local companies will not benefit from the cross-pollination of skills, ideas and experiences that a good marketing person can bring from one industry and reapply in another.

We decided to get the views from a spread of professionals about the idea of marketing as an industry rather than merely an operational function of another industry and the idea of bringing everyone with a stake in the quality of marketing practice, under one roof for regular discussion and the sharing of problems and ideas.

Ernest Cyril De Run, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak

John Burbidge, Roicom

Nicholas Sze, Tigas Pharma

Benefits Of Bringing Stakeholders Together