Steve Johnson
sjohnson@pragmaticmarketing.com

We have too much on our plates to micromanage others--or to second-guess them, for that matter.

I frequently encounter product managers who are dabbling in marketing communications. "Maybe we should have cookies in the booth" and "I don't like this image in the brochure" are not appropriate uses of product management skills. We get so caught up in doing the jobs of others that we fail to do our jobs, causing others to do our jobs. It's a vicious cycle.

Furthermore, most product managers don't know anything about communications. So their opinion, while interesting, is irrelevant.

Often, product managers go to marcom with a checklist: "I need a brochure, and a web page, and a demo disk, and a press tour." Check-check-check from the marketing checklist. Do we need all these? and more importantly, if everything follows the checklist, is anything effective?

Just as product management should bring market problems to development to solve, we should bring channel problems to marcom to solve. Instead of telling marcom what to do, we need to articulate the problems the channel is encountering and ask marcom to use their brilliance to solve channel problems.

Do you need a brochure, or can a web page do it? Do you need a web page or is a brochure better? Should we go to this show or that one? These are all questions that marcom can answer.

A few years ago, my marcom folks decided that a press tour was in order. So I sat down with them, discussed our positioning and our new story, and ended the meeting. The next day, my marketing specialist brought me the presentation she had created from our meeting. She had about 40 slides (some were optional) plus speaker notes. She knew that I planned talk to about adoption of the product category in the general market, so she pulled estimates from Gartner research to illustrate the point. If your marcom people cannot duplicate this feat, you need some new marcom people.

Integrated marketing refers to a complete campaign with a family of brochures, mailers, advertising, web site updates and so on. Instead of bringing a single postcard to the VP for approval, effective marcom people bring the entire campaign with concepts, benchmarks, expected results, target lists and so on... getting one approval for the entire campaign instead of one approval per individual piece.

Marcom is the specialist in communication. Product management is the expert in the market, not in market communications. Let's each do our own jobs.