This is the first of a four-parts article wondering on how marketing seems to have lost its inventiveness and irreverence, no longer being able to surprise, and on how finance seems to have reinvented itself and taken over the traditional marketing’s primary position in the corporate ladder.
This is how it used to be:
- Marketeers were a company’s main source of creative energy, those who had that special character, that inventive sparkle, those who were able to think out of the box in a continuous search for newness, those who proactively fabricated appealing new ideas and concepts that propelled businesses to growth and success;
- Financiers were those rational minds that always played by the book and that were the ultimate safeguard of a company’s solvability and liquidity, protecting it from too much risk exposure, which included keeping an eye on marketeers, preventing them from going overboard with too much enthusiasm and too little calculation.
Shareholders expected marketeers to fill their pockets through dynamic business growth and expected financiers to protect their pockets from imprudent excesses of marketeers.
This is how it used to be as long as companies adopted departmental structures with specific roles assigned to specific functions. Yet, if we look back to the last three decades or so, we can see that the corporate landscape has been gradually but profoundly changing. What is no longer is what it used to be. People can hardly recognize today that old picture whose colors have faded away with time. The reddish marketeers seem to have turned blue while the greyish financiers seem to have turned pink.
How did this shift happen? Why did this change happen? Is the world upside down?