First post: the past

Welcome to this new community for marketers interested in the growth of corporate marketing - which I believe 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, business ecosystem management...as well as the more traditional competencies of corporate communications, corporate branding and corporate social responsibility.

[Message from busy.body... Tim has started a new community you can find here.]

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 Cs seem to be attributes or at least the outcomes of attributes (culture and character for instance) while others are modes of mutual perception (conceptualisations and covenants) and a third group loosely relates to the means of connecting these two - communications and consituencies.

That niggle aside, no-one has done more than Balmer to date to apply marketing-based thinking to organisational resilience and sustainability. Actually the great strength of this schematic is its breadth, and the immensity of the questions it begs:

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 its competitiveness - and how far will efforts to improve or communication actual affect that character...?

Looking ahead, 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.

What is missing in Balmer's approach, for me, is the question of organisational fulfilment, though.

In the 4, 5, 6 or even 7 Ps of marketing, we describe product, price, place, promotion, packaging and performance, we look to understand the controllable elements that govern product success.

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...