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Marketing is disposable and unimportant to strategic development.

Its recruits are inferior to those in other disciplines.

It is untrustworthy, unreliable, unco-operative and it lacks leadership.

Such are the findings of a study into how marketing and marketers are perceived by their peers in other departments on both sides of the Atlantic.

Few professions indulge in such regular navel-gazing as marketing. But is this study, carried out by Research International, more than just another bout of introspection? Does it indicate that, despite the apparent strides marketers have made toward improving accountability, there is still something wrong at the heart of the profession?

Marketing academics believe the findings are accurate and that marketing still has a mountain to climb to restore its tarnished reputation. 'Marketing does not have the pre-eminence it once did; it is now a second-tier function,' argues Simon Knox, professor of brand marketing at Cranfield School of Management.

'We were the people who were going to change the world and be the business leaders, but finance remains the path to the top.'

Credibility issue

Hugh Davidson, visiting professor at Cranfield and author of Even More Offensive Marketing, agrees. 'Nothing much has changed over the past 20 years,' he says. 'Many of us are still weak on business analysis and substance and bad at communicating.' Or as John Quelch, associate dean of international development at Harvard Business School, puts it: 'Marketing is challenged as never before.'

Despite high-profile marketing successes such as Tesco, there is no room for complacency. Marketers' confidence may have been eroded over the years by regular accusations of being 'soft' and wasting money, but they have missed opportunities to restore their credibility. 'Marketing needs better data management, customer insight and quantitative analysis, but it has shown no discernible trend toward doing this,' says Knox. 'It has not taken ownership of knowledge management and it has let IT take hold of CRM - with disastrous results. No wonder marketing is being marginalised.'

Davidson believes that marketers must adopt a three-pronged approach to increase their effectiveness and their standing: first, work out exactly what they should be doing; second, practise marketing properly; and third, communicate what they do. 'If you get 10 marketers around a table, they will come up with 10 different definitions of marketing,' he argues. 'It's no wonder their colleagues can't work out what they do.'

Davidson believes the best and simplest definition of marketing is 'managing demand profitably'. Changing its name to 'demand management', he says, would do much to focus marketers' minds and clarify others' perceptions.

Short-term trouble

Effective practice requires marketers to stay in their jobs longer. The average tenure of a marketing director is 18 months, making it difficult to build relationships, hampering real progress and perpetuating marketers' reputation as fly-by-nights. 'It has been a disease of marketers for decades that they think that if they are not headhunted into a new job every 18 months they have failed,' says Davidson.

Marketers must also be the best business analysts in the company, building credibility with numbers and generating reliable forecasts, he adds. They must then communicate what they do to the rest of the business, particularly finance and operations, then to other business people and the financial pages of the broadsheets.

Malcolm McDonald, emeritus professor at Cranfield, believes the marketing community is held in such low esteem because it lacks qualifications with the same standing as, for example, those provided by the Institute of Chartered Accountants - a view shared by Dianne Thompson, Camelot chief executive and president of the Chartered Institute of Marketing. 'The profession has failed to instil the need for professional recognition,' she says. 'Companies are too happy to employ marketers who are unqualified.'

Others, however, question the value of professional qualifications in marketing. Martin Harrison, European chief financial officer of ICI subsidiary National Starch and Chemicals, believes that trying to capture the breadth of marketing in a single qualification renders it meaningless.

With marketers generally agreed to be light on finance and broad business skills, the CIM qualification is arguably too narrowly focused on marketing to produce the business-oriented, numerate marketers that companies really need. 'When marketers talk about 'accountability', they are really talking about return on investment from promotional activities,' McDonald adds. 'They have largely failed to get to grips with real shareholder value, which is the real reason so few large companies have a marketing person on the board.'

Unqualified success

Tim Ambler, senior marketing fellow at London Business School, believes that while the CIM provides a good grounding in basic marketing skills, marketers aged over 25 should immerse themselves in business, with more training done on the job. 'As marketing spreads among businesses, there will be more places for traineess to go,' he says. He adds that marketing departments would benefit from 'one or two' MBAs with the business skills that can help them justify their contribution.

Some of the highest-profile marketers are not merely unqualified in marketing; they come from different backgrounds altogether. Unilever chairman Sir Niall FitzGerald and Centrica chief executive Sir Roy Gardner both run highly customer-oriented organisations with strong marketing departments.

Both are accountants by training but marketers by instinct - though Gardner confesses to being 'a converted sceptic' about the value of marketing and customer management.

'Like many accountants, I often dismissed my marketing colleagues as 'soft' and wondered whether the money they were spending could be put to better use,' he admits. 'More chief executives and finance directors should take the time to understand marketing. A properly delivered strategy can unlock considerable value for shareholders.'

Business literacy

Gardner believes that marketers should be leading the way in demonstrating how their activities create economic value for the company. 'To do this they have to stop thinking of themselves as functional specialists,' he advises. 'They must become more literate in economic and financial analysis and act as the customer champion within the organisation - developing and delivering customer-driven strategies.'

Centrica's customer management programme, spearheaded by group marketing director Simon Waugh, is the driving force behind the company's value creation in its energy, home and road services businesses. 'Group marketing has forged deep alliances with finance, information services, sales and customer service to create a multifunctional approach to customer management,' Gardner explains. 'This is an approach that fuses customer insight, long-term value potential and service delivery.'

Expenditure is determined by what will have the greatest impact on customer retention and long-term brand equity, meaning that advertising campaigns are weighed against the benefits of deploying more British Gas engineers or AA patrols, or putting better-trained staff in call centres.

The CIM is likely to become less influential in developing top-flight marketers since its bold strategy to become the voice of marketing foundered in March with the departure of chief executive Peter Fisk and the discovery of financial problems related to its charitable status.

The Marketing Society, meanwhile, is augmenting its role as a forum for exchanging ideas with a more external focus. Two weeks ago the Society launched the Marketing Leaders programme to provide training for aspiring marketing directors.

The first initiative of its kind, it will be taught by marketing directors such as Tim Mason of Tesco, Simon Gulliford of Barclays and Amanda McKenzie of BT. And in November, the Society's annual conference will take the form of a summit, with delegates participating in think-tanks to write a marketing manifesto that the organisation can distribute to a wider business audience.

The views of respondents to the Research International survey varied according to their background. Manufacturing and human resources, for example, put a higher value on marketing than their finance colleagues.

Marketing's own straw poll confirmed the disparity. Chris Bones, group organisation effectiveness and development director at Cadbury Schweppes, values the discipline highly. 'Marketing plays a critical role in FMCG, and our entire customer insight platform, brand development and corporate strategy is owned by marketing,' he says. 'It is the most over-subscribed graduate entry point we have and attracts some of the brightest people.'

Cadbury Schweppes works hard to train marketers in sales and finance, moving them around different functions and ensuring they have experience in interface roles. They are helped by the close connection and understanding between departments, which, says Bones, helps break down suspicions.

In contrast, ICI's Harrison takes a more negative view, arguing that marketers need to be more realistic. 'Marketing does itself no favours by presenting everything in the best possible light,' he argues. 'It should be more honest and objective about its failures.'

According to Harrison, marketing tends to look down on sales as too commercial, and holds itself aloof from finance. 'Marketers tend to be driven by creating big brands rather than profitable brands, and measure themselves by their credibility in the marketing world,' he says.

If marketers are to overcome negative perceptions of their discipline, they must be seen by other functions to deliver. The more they overhaul companies to better suit what customers want - or might unconsciously need - and stop mumbling meaningless mantras such as 'leveraging customer value', the better.

- 54% believe if marketing was abolished it would have little or manageable impact on the company

- 71% believe advertising and promotion is the most important thing marketing does

- 47% of respondents to the survey have little or no idea of what marketing does

ESSENTIALS - HOW THE UK AND US COMPARE

The Research International survey identified distinct differences between the perceptions of marketing in the US and the UK. Attitudes were generally more favourable in the US; there was greater awareness of what marketing does, and other departments rated the function's contribution more highly.

US marketers themselves have a higher degree of self-worth: 80% said their organisation couldn't survive without marketing, compared with 60% in the UK.

When asked who should lead marketing, US respondents cited the marketing director, followed by the CEO and then the corporate board. In the UK, it was felt the board should lead marketing, with the marketing director in second and the CEO third.

Both UK and US respondents said that marketing was the second-least critical function in the company after human resources. But while IT is marketing's strongest critic in the UK, in the US it is finance.

In terms of trustworthiness, non-marketers in the US rate marketers below all professions bar estate agents; in the UK, marketers were ranked above estate agents, advertising agency staff and journalists.

John Quelch, associate dean of international development at Harvard Business School, attributes the different views to the fact that in the US a higher proportion of marketers go into general management. The US business qualification is the MBA, whereas in the UK it is the accountancy certificate.

According to Quelch, an economic upturn will revive interest in marketing, but the pressure to prove return on investment is greater than ever. 'We need a big investment in marketing science,' he says. 'The academics have a big responsibility.'