The difficulty of routines

I love and hate routines. Our love affair bases on safety and ease: it is comfortable to act in the usual way. No thinking needed, familiar processes go on automatically. Our hate relationship rests on frustration – why it is so difficult to change inefficient routines? How to get started and done?

At home, good routines make mornings easy: from wake-up to shower, clothes, coffee and morning paper before leaving to work. At work, a settle down by logging in and checking e-mails and… here begins the hate part. I mean, hating questionable and firmly stuck routines.

Besides nice and professional people, the best elements of my work in marketing are variety and creativity. No similar day exists. Good routines make my tasks flow smoothly. Still, I’m prone to fit unnecessary routines in my days.

I used to work in developing but traditional businesses. I struggled against practices that originated long before my time. Sat through routine meetings with very little added value, became accustomed to them. The progress towards streamlined work processes was slow. Who can afford it today?

It is difficult to admit a need to change. In addition to own struggles I needed external help to realize that instead of developing or adapting to randomly born, worn-out routines I could develop better ones.

The above applies also to business life. External support is often essential in being able to think out of the box. A company’s true marketing potential is easier to see and utilize with a close but external partner. To get started, simple realizations are needed: This work process is outdated, I need a better one. I benefit from a coach with expertise in this field.

Doctor Livingstone, I presume?

Take a look around and you’ll see the same everywhere: companies are straining to improve competitiveness. And that probably includes your company, too! Most likely you have mapped opportunities in the field of sales, production and R&D, but quite a few companies have a huge white area on the map ready to be explored and – if properly done – exploited. And you don’t have to be Stanley to do it.

In fact, it could be better to be an armchair explorer and let the others do the dirty work. However, many companies have been busy building their own marketing departments while others have not even explored how marketing can increase competitiveness.

Alas, they both may share the same, sometimes even well founded fear that external marketing providers offer some shady voodoo-advice and when they do, it costs a fortune.

Luckily to them, you and us, the marketing industry has during the last decade come up with an offering that’s bound to open up tremendous new opportunities. Just like finding America did a while back… Think marketing automation!

Global economy has brought the buying groups close together meaning that economy of scale is easier to establish than before. There are advanced solutions out there that will boost effectiveness and efficiency of any company’s marketing.

I strongly feel that in 2020 the casual small talk between marketing professionals will include topics like: “Where were you when the marketing automation solution X came into market?” or “How did you cope before the solution X?”

You don’t need a crystal ball to see where the world is going. And the lines in a certain film starred by a current governor of California sums it up pretty well: “Resistance is useless.” The marketing automation is here to stay.

Why does marketing need process?

Marketing is in a central role when increasing the competitiveness of industry, because you need customer insight and make your product/service offering compelling for your customer. This in turn requires you to aligning your competencies so that you increase your competitiveness.

Marketing has been slow to respond to the globalization of industry and is still in a tailor making mode. This prevents customers to jump on the bandwagon of marketing.

Marketing needs to become a word that is on everyone's lips as a solution provider for the way we compete.

We have to create a common language that creates an open community where all can participate. MarketingProcessor builds a marketing process from segmentation, how to compete, getting the message to the target group and monitoring our performance. This web based tool provides a methodology and terminology that can be easily understood by non marketers and makes marketing transparent in the organization. This is especially important for product marketing where participation from various functions within the company is important in building product excellence.

Without a marketing process we will not be able to create an agile service and work in a global market.