MarCom Professional

First post: the past

Glasshouse Partnership believes (we kind of have to) that corporate marketing will be one of the fastest areas of marketing growth over the next twenty years, taking on board emerging bleeding-edge thinking from business process design and business ecosystem management..

Corporate marketing is not some newfangled PR 2.0 though. It embraces very more traditional competencies (corporate communications, corporate branding and corporate social responsibility) and strives to make them useful.

I thought I'd kick off by planting a few seeds of thinking around the idea of corporate marketing - both as a philosophy and a set of linked disciplines...

Here, to get the juices flowing is Prof. John Balmer's 1990s schematic of the 6Cs of organisational marketing...

Now, there's a lot of 'category error' going on in diagrams like this one...some of Prof' Balmer's Cs seem to be attributes , or at least the outcomes of attributes (e.g. culture and character for instance), while others are modes of inter-perception (e.g. conceptualisations and covenants) and the remaining third group loosely relates to the means of connecting these two - the remaining concepts, like communications and consituencies.

Academic niggles aside, no-one has done more than Balmer to date ,to apply rigorous marketing-based thinking to the big organisational marketing quetsions like 'organisational resilience' and 'commercial sustainability'.

Whe you REALLY look at it, the great strength of this schematic is its breadth, and the immensity of the questions it begs. Let it sink in:

At one extreme it poses philosophical questions like: what exactly is the role of the corporation; and what is the nature of its covenant...

And at the other it implies very practical questions like: what is the relationship between the character of an organisation and does it actually help its competitiveness (HR people - start quaking!) - and equally: how far will efforts to improve or communication actual affect that character (PR-folk RIP?).

Looked at though the Balmer lens...we know nothing! it would be great if others can bring fresh new models into this community - including their own, so that we can debate the value of different approaches....

Leeting rip for a sec, what is missing in Balmer's approach, for me, is the question of organisational fulfilment...

In the 4, 5, 6 or even 7 Ps (??) of marketing, we get describe product, price, place, promotion, packaging and performance, and we are generally looking to understand the controllable elements that govern product success. Here - in the 6Cs - we have no equivalent. No controllable elements.

The search is on for an equivalent set of enterprise controllables - those elements which determine the highest level of stakeholder satisfaction - at the lowest cost in organisational resources.

Maybe the collective brainpower of the marcom professional commuity can concoct something better together. Surely...