Marketing Essentials: Where's the marketer? The organizational role of marketing.

Check out the management team of any publicly traded corporation on Yahoo Finance and you'll see that every corporation has a team of executives that typically includes a CEO, CFO, COO, CTO, EVP of HR, and a General Counsel. These executives manage the corporation's assets.

CFO manages capital
COO manages facilities
CTO manages technology
HR manages people
GC manages intellectual property and contracts
CIO manages data

Where's the marketing executive? Only seven Fortune 100 companies have a CMO on their executive teams because marketers manage customer relationships and most companies have not yet recognized customers as an asset (they only recently recognized data as an asset).

Although marketers have not yet broken into the C-Level ranks yet, the role of marketing is absolutely critical to the success of every organization. The marketer is responsible for understanding what is taking place outside the organization, identifying profitable opportunities, and providing the Chiefs listed above with information that helps them to align the company's resources to capture those opportunities. Marketing is, therefore strategic (marketing activities that erroneously include the word marketing like telemarketing, guerilla marketing, and punk marketing are tactical).

The Chiefs seldom have to leave their offices. Without a marketer, the CFO would not know what type of financing customers expect or prefer, the COO would not know what to manufacture, what to procure, how many of a product to make or where to ship them, the CTO would not know what kind of systems are required to service and support customers, and HR would not know what kind of skills employees need to have.

Companies like Apple grow during a recession because they have a strong marketing function that understands the marketplace and provides the Chiefs with timely and accurate information that helps them to optimize the alignment of the corporations resources with profitable opportunities. Companies like GM fail because they have a weak marketing function that is not connected with the customer. Instead of building more electric cars, GM scrapped the EV-1 to launch Hummer, a gas guzzling SUV that it sold off in 2009 to Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Company of China.