At first sight, most companies today display a marketing orientation. Communications to investors as well as the business press relay an abundant flow of news, signaling the widespread effort of corporations to meet their customers' needs and wants.

But even our most dynamic corporations fill the business graveyards with new products and services that people do not buy (e.g., Apple Newton, Pets.com), new brand names with unintended meaning (e.g., Toyota MR2 for the French market), and other forms of momentary lapse of marketing discipline.

Anecdotal evidence shows that some key individuals in a corporation bear sometimes an overwhelming responsibility in a market success or failure. In that situation, the recurrence of failure can generally be avoided with proper career management and training. With luck, the executive learned from his mistake and the failure can then be seen as the cost of his graduation.

"The real danger comes from disconnects and inertia"

For example, the president of a Fortune 100 company had been recently promoted from a finance career path. Although this character was no stereotype, he truly despised marketing and marketers, which might have led to the failed launch of a key product under his watch. With some coaching from Jack Welch, it took the new president about six months at the helm to turn himself into a champion of brand management.

The real danger does not come from the lack of knowledge of specific individuals, but from systematic disconnects as well as cultural inertia across the organization. This seems to happen most often when a company is isolated, geographically or professionally (i.e., law firms, hospitals), and sees marketing as a separate function.

It does help to have a payroll loaded with MBAs from top schools and headquarters in large urban centers where information, stimulation and trends flow. However, if marketing is understood as the corporate equivalent of a central nervous system, your company could be based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and still coordinate nearly 98,000 people across 80 countries who steward a portfolio of over 100 top brands. This is the situation of Procter & Gamble, a chemical company that has built a reputation for rigorous marketing processes and is considered a university in that discipline.

Following that path, marketing should be both creative and accountable. It is an art and also a management science, calling for the implementation of rigorous processes and metrics.

Therefore, it is not surprising that the Baldridge Criteria for Performance Excellence puts Marketing in a leading role, together with Leadership and Strategic Planning. It should be noted that, as a group, the US companies that won the coveted Baldridge Award have routinely outperformed the S&P 500 Index by as much as a six to one ratio.

"Marketing is the equivalent of a central nervous system"

Without the organizational framework that marketing provides, the odds are that the strategy will be company-push rather than market-pull. There are many examples of highly successful company-push strategies. Akio Morita's Walkman is a well publicized case; most monopolies may fall into this category as well. However, behind most cases of successful company-push strategies probably hides the fact that those companies benefited from weak competitors. To paraphrase Hans Schultze, the former president of Ritz-Carlton, "it is easy to be ahead of a lousy lot, but it does not stop customers from complaining."

The customer is indeed at the very heart of the problem. Great strategies are developed around the customer, and help the whole organization work as one to achieve its simple fundamental objective: selling more, and more profitably.

To ensure that business and corporate strategies are customer-centric is easier than putting a man on the moon. On paper, in the case of a single-brand company, it is even disarmingly simple.

As a first step, it is good practice to start with the brand positioning strategy. The latter is indeed the game plan that seeks to influence consumers' behavior.

The marketing strategy is then the second layer, building on the brand positioning strategy. It not only includes sales, distribution, and communication strategies, but also drives R&D, production, and HR strategies. As such, the process helps the organization avoid releasing products and services that will not sell.

The business and corporate strategy layers come on the top of the marketing strategy. It deals with the financing needs and other resource allocation issues that enables the marketing strategy and ensures the going-concern nature of the corporation.

The merger of P&G and Gillette, for instance, falls in this category. It is a corporate strategy decision that helps the marketing strategy in terms of prices, costs, and perhaps an array of cross-fertilizations, among other factors.

Since this process started with the customer, the corporate strategy ends up being totally customer-driven.

The process loops continuously as to ensure that none of these steps is developed without a reality check or a market feedback. When both the strategy is right and the organization delivers reliably, that is usually when customers say "Wow," and rush to buy more of—or accept to pay more for—your products or services.

Designed by BMW, the new Mini was such a bull's eye. The process started with the brand positioning of the old Mini in the mind of the consumer. The brand positioning strategy tweaked the existing set of memories in consumer's mind by adding new key attributes such as safety. The old Mini handled superbly, but had virtually no passive safety feature; some qualified the British icon as "a coffin on wheels." BMW had to address those concerns. Not surprisingly, the car's features include not only specific design and color cues that remind one of the classic car, but also a set of sophisticated passenger restraint devices.

Timing is critical as well. Some companies, such as Wal-Mart and Dell, have recognized early the incredible speed at which our economic and technological environments are now changing. Their strategy processes therefore ensure that the loop provides quick feedback, which is both a guarantee of survival and a hedge against slower competitors. Wal-Mart thus gained market share over K-Mart, embroiled in a restructuring, and Dell outflanked HP/Compaq, Sun, IBM and Palm with an array of new products in categories adjacent to the PC, e.g., printers, servers, PDAs.

"Resistance to change makes good marketing difficult in practice"

If it is so simple on paper, why is it so difficult to go from theory to practice? Among the gazillion reasons that are specific to each individual company, the common factor is the resistance to change ingrained in human nature.

Resistance to change is a pernicious attitude that is hardly conscious. For example, conventional organization charts contribute to reinforcing the wrong behaviors, as they show the CEO at the top and the receptionist at the bottom. Notice that the customer is not part of this picture. Actually, the org chart is likely to be a juxtaposition of silos, those functional departments that communicate much more vertically (i.e., internally) than horizontally (i.e., across the organization). When the customer calls on the phone, it is the receptionist who picks up, not the CEO. Who is the most important person in that scenario?

A better way to represent an organization is through a value chain. Then, the customer and the receptionist will both be more prominently displayed. Unfortunately, since Westerners write from left to right, supplies enter on the left, and the customer is showed last on the right-hand side. Those models contribute to corporate-push and the arrogant attitude that typically goes with it, e.g., "We have to educate the customer!"

Those organizational issues are marketing issues. Companies where marketing is given a role that is both strategic and systemic (i.e., process-oriented) put themselves in a better position to stay competitive. They manage to live in a symbiosis with their increasingly demanding customers and their changing environment. As such, marketing goes beyond its support role and penetrates most aspects of the organization, as a budgeting system would. In a highly competitive and fast-changing world, the debate is not whether marketing should be a priority. Simply put, marketing is the name of the game.