NO - GARY MOSS, CHAIRMAN, BRAND VISTA
Excellence in marketing drives brands to levels of consumer understanding that powers truly differentiated and sustainable positions, and results in communication strategies that help deliver these positions.
Why wouldn't this be pursued with budgetary responsibility, which helps to avoid inadequate thinking and execution? Marketing and communication are no different from other aspects of business - if you put something poor in, you get poor results out.
Excellence and budgetary responsibility are a no-brainer in other parts of business and they should be in marketing, too. The alternative moves brands dangerously toward undifferentiated, generic positions which become reliant on blunt weapons such as price to 'differentiate' and a spiral into the world of commodity.
Too many brands have been sacrificed on the altar of mediocrity and any drive toward excellence with budgetary responsibility must be encouraged as best practice in marketing, on both the client-side and in agencies.
NO - NICK DORMON, MANAGING DIRECTOR, ECHO BRAND DESIGN
With budget responsibility comes performance responsibility. Publicly quoted companies are driven by quarterly results and this short-term financial cycle has a knock-on effect on the marketing department. With marketing directors focusing on near-term brand planning, failing brands must be propped up and incremental growth found from successful ones. By the time the day-to-day activities are planned, there is little room for much else.
The advantage of having a parallel marketing director focusing on excellence is that they can step back and look at processes of marketing rather than the content - taking time out from chopping down the tree to sharpen the axe. More important, they can facilitate long-term strategies, if necessary incorporating higher investment step-changes to keep brands at the top of their game. The challenge, though, is that with no budget or performance responsibility, there is little power, so unless the business is patient enough to wait for the benefits to show, their tenure could be short.
YES - DEBBIE SMITH, MANAGING DIRECTOR, METEORITE
Imagine a finance director who was just responsible for ensuring general excellence in financial best practice, but with no accountability. Your first observation would surely be that the quality of the people you employ is how to ensure excellence. In a discipline already struggling to gain credibility in the boardroom, divorcing budget responsibility from the role of a marketing director further reinforces the thinking that it is nothing more than a fluffy discipline surrounding 'doing advertising' and lacking the rigour and working practices of other board practitioners.
The idea, then, that a marketing director with full budget responsibility reports to someone whose only role is to ensure they deliver excellence in marketing would suggest a lack of trust in their ability.
Likewise, as we all know, it's easy to talk about excellence and group best practice when it is divorced from the coalface and reality of budget and market pressures. As a marketing director with budgetary responsibility, I would find the role a distraction at best, and at worst, a snub.
NO - MICHELE MCGRATH, PARTNER, BRAND LEARNING
Building marketing excellence is entirely consistent with financial and commercial responsibility.
While top-line revenue growth might be the traditional remit of the marketer, bottom-line value growth is increasingly the focus of marketers keen to have an impact on long-term business performance. To do this in a sustainable way, marketing leaders need high-performing teams to deliver growth. This need for marketing excellence is heightened further by the growing number of brands that require management across categories and geographical boundaries, because in doing so, the scale of financial risk - as well as opportunity - increases.
As such, building marketing excellence plays a critical role. Nestle needs to focus not only on meeting budget targets but also on building its marketing excellence on a global scale if it is to compete effectively against Kraft with its Cadbury portfolio.
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