Marketing

A very important factor in the success of a company is the marketing strategies and the marketing personnel that is being used on a daily basis. As the marketplace evolves ever more rapidly, marketers struggle to keep pace. In our marketing department we have started to concentrate more on the issues that have been failing in the past years for us by adjusting our traditional stratagems--redesigning market segmentations, building stronger brands, and hiring new and better marketing managers--are very necessary. Unless these solutions can be mobilized rapidly, we could find ourselves overtaken by our competitors, for a fundamentally different way of organizing companies to exploit opportunity seems to be emerging among many of our growth leaders. You might call us venture-marketing organizations, since like venture capitalists we are quick to spot new possibilities, to allocate resources to the best ones, and to cut our losses as we go. We have decided to turn our marketing department around and make it become our most important key factor for our business. Marketing to new customers and to our existing customers is going to be our deepest concentration for the moment. We have decided to concentrate on marketing the quality of our products and the benefits of wearing our materials during their workouts or performing events.

Our groups realized that to outpace the market consistently, we must not only create fluid organizational structures but also provide for unyielding rigor in measurement and decision making. As a result, we will enjoy revenue growth rates that on average are one and a half times those of the competition. When traditional marketers think of organization, they mean structure: distinct product, channel, and customer groups focusing on specific functional tasks, such as brand management, customer segment management, and market research. Our functional managers will play the pivotal roles in these functionally focused groups, which are responsible for generating ideas and taking them to market.

But the traditional approach hinders the fluidity required to keep pace with the market's evolution. For when market priorities change, traditionalists take a "wreck and rebuild" approach that consumes the precious time of top executives, disrupts action on the front lines, and, worst of all, often fails to yield the intended results.

Our new-style marketing groups will understand that formal structures