Portrait of the CEO as Salesman

 

Selling is a devalued skill. It's considered beneath anyone with an M.B.A.'s training. Marketing, on the other hand, is somehow "clean," something professional businesspeople aspire to. If you go to a cocktail party and you're asked what you do for a living, and you reply, "I'm a salesman," people look at you like you've got crumbs on your shirt. Tell them you're a marketing director, however, and they say "How interesting." One has become a high-status occupation and the other something most people don't want to get their hands dirty doing.

In my view, this is one of the worst hoaxes ever pulled on American business. Manufacturers perceive marketing as a magic solution that takes away their responsibility for making good products. Their idea is, we'll make a product that's just as good as anything else out there--not better, mind you, but just as good--and marketing it well will make us rich. And that's a lot of crap.

I think just the opposite is true. Marketing is all about creating, in the customer's mind, a value that does not exist: a way of differentiating a basically undifferentiated product and charging the consumer more money for it. Selling is fundamental. It is impossible to go out and sell a product you don't believe in, particularly if, as CEO, you're directly responsible for the quality of the product. Again and again, American business breaks that direct-feedback loop by divorcing responsibility for making the product from the responsibility for selling it.

And that has dire consequences. We're all consumers. We don't buy products because they happen to be better marketed. We look for better-made products. And if we--you and I--feel that way as consumers, why do we seem to believe that there's some undefined mass that wants to buy better-marketed products?

Consumers are not idiots. They want detergents that get their clothes cleaner, not detergents with slicker advertising campaigns. They want cars that are cheaper and more reliable, not cars with marketing images built around the quality hype. Japanese manufacturers have taken over whole segments of the American marketplace, but if you go back 20 years or so, you'll remember that Japanese cars were considered jokes, "little tin boxes" that nobody wanted--except that they were reasonably well made and represented value for the money. Their marketing campaigns ranged from mediocre to terrible--if the cars hadn't been good values, the Japanese could have spent their entire gross national product on marketing their cars and it wouldn't have made any difference--but their products succeeded. And they succeeded because the inherent quality of the product itself will inevitably overwhelm all the marketing expertise in the world.

Why have we ignored this? Because, sad to say, it's a lot easier to differentiate your product through the quality of the marketing than through the quality of the product. To go back to the automobile industry, it's easier to change your advertising campaign than it is to build a better car--as General Motors well knows. Changing your ads to focus on quality is a snap. Just give your agency a new set of instructions, and it can do the job for you in a week.

I happen to be in a business that almost everyone thinks of as being primarily market driven. And that's no surprise. Most of the major brands of beer out there are virtually indistinguishable--at least when it comes to taste. After a couple of bottles, even I can't tell the difference between a Budweiser, a Miller, or a Coors. To a great extent these products are differentiated to the consumer solely through marketing. Thus the principal task in selling them is to make the consumer think that there's something implicitly good about becoming, say, a Bud drinker. The beer itself is often the least important element in the equation. You even hear it in the vocabulary. Beer people talk in terms of "users" and "moving product," not drinkers and selling beer. It's not the beer in the bottle that matters, it's what the marketing people lay on top of it.

Today, there are other ways besides advertising to communicate with consumers. Impartial third parties rate everything from cars to chocolate bars. Take beer. The only competition in American brewing is the Great American Beer Festival. Once a year, the Association of Brewers gathers more than a hundred of the best beers from virtually every brewery in the country for a comparative tasting by 4,000 brewers, beer writers, and beer lovers. For three years in a row, Samuel Adams has been picked as the best beer in America. And this has been reported widely in the national press. That has impact. The S & S Pocket Guide to Beer, World Beer Review, and The Wine Advocate all gave Samuel Adams the highest rating for any American lager. Superior products can build a consumer franchise that way. It's getting harder and harder to distract the consumer with mere advertising about quality.

Now I'm a big fan of beer ads myself. They're extremely clever and entertaining; I love the jingles. They make me feel good, make me proud to be an American. I could watch beer ads all night. Just don't ask me to drink the beer, too.

And I'm not knocking marketing people as individuals, either. Many of them are warm, intelligent, and creative. They're some of the business world's best and brightest. I only wish they'd get out and try to sell some of the product they're hyping. It's sort of the same way I feel about lawyers: they may be wonderful people individually, but what value do they really add to the customer?

See, to the consumer--I'm talking about the person sitting at the bar choosing a beer--markets don't exist. Market niches don't exist. These are concepts that exist only in the minds of people with a vested interest in promoting them. To me the only realÿ

 PREV  1 | 2