Marketing as a Dumping Ground

Companies that use marketing departments as catch-alls for work that doesn’t seem to fit into any other department only shortchange themselves.

Over decades in operation working with companies large and small, the FrogDog team has seen organizations put all kinds of responsibilities into the marketing department.

Marketers Not Marketing

We’ve seen more than one company that had its marketing team serving as the corporate travel agency, booking hotels, flights, cars, tickets, and making dinner reservations for sales teams, executives, and clients.

We’ve seen companies that had their marketing teams stuffing mailers and handing out the daily post, in addition to collating materials for conference and meeting folders and bags.

We’ve seen marketers as secretaries and administrative assistants. As double agents doing front-desk and receptionist duty. As sales-support teams helping to prepare packets for sales personnel to take to meetings and proposals for salespeople to submit to clients and prospects.

And while all these are important—in fact, vital—functions, they sure aren’t marketing.

The Consequences of Making Marketing a Dumping Ground

In some cases, these companies pay their marketing teams salary levels commensurate with experienced marketing staff—and then take up their valuable work time with nonmarketing tasks. This means these companies don’t get the benefits of the skills they’ve paid well to bring on board.

In other cases, these companies have people new to marketing in these roles. These freshly fledged marketers can’t get the experience and the training they need to grow and succeed in their field of interest—because they don’t get a robust, genuine opportunity to do marketing work and to learn under the tutelage of experienced marketers with the time and capacity to train them. These people will never grow into experienced, skilled marketers under these circumstances—and that’s not fair to them.

And in both cases, these companies will soon enough say that marketing is too expensive and that it doesn’t perform.

Clear the Clutter for Performance: Assess Your Marketing Function

Every job takes on responsibilities that may not directly fall into the profession’s overarching areas of interest or job category.

Yet when these side functions become a significant portion of the work, consuming the predominance of energy and focus and leaving little bandwidth for the roles and responsibilities for which people or teams have been hired, the companies for which they work are shortchanged.

Are you doing this to yourself (and to your team)? Do you need help assessing and optimizing your company’s marketing function? Contact FrogDog today.