The Apprentice highlights crisis in marketing
When reality television turns its spotlight on business, it reveals both the promise and the problems besetting marketing, as Simon van Wyk writes
I fail to understand the current popularity of reality TV. The personality dynamics that occur when you throw 16 people in the jungle for a month and get them to vote each other off the show might have been interesting enough to watch once, but for 10 series? Mind you, at least the scenery changes in Survivor, whereas any shot ever taken of Big Brother seems to consist of a bunch of primary school dropouts sitting around on a lounge talking about absolutely nothing.
And if I see a promotion for another show about Australian ‘celebrities’ getting fit, dancing or fixing someone’s house, I’m going to scream. Next thing you know, they’ll be joining the circus. (What’s that? they are joining the circus? EEEEEEAAAAAAUUUUGGGGHHHH!)
There is one exception to this rule: I have been riveted by The Apprentice. I thought I would hate it - a bunch of self-important MBAs trying to out-sycophant themselves in front of the abominable Donald Trump, the king of egotism and self-promotion. Despite my misgivings, I decided to watch the first episode - and I have been hooked ever since.
A bunch of (mainly young) MBAs, lawyers, entrepreneurs, marketing executives, project managers and real estate salesmen are divided into two groups and try to outdo themselves in a series of business tasks against a glamorous New York backdrop, with the ultimate winner earning an executive role in Trump’s business empire. In many ways it is the antithesis of Survivor - the teams stay together in a luxurious penthouse at Trump Tower rather than in bedraggled lean-to’s on separate desert islands - although the personality clashes are the same no matter where you place a group of Type A-personality Americans.
I think what I like most about The Apprentice is that each episode is a textbook lesson in what not to do in business. In fact, in a case of life imitating art, many universities such as Harvard are now running courses for their business students where they analyse episodes of The Apprentice in class.
The would-be apprentices delegate too much or too little, they quibble and pout and focus on personalities rather than the task at hand, and worst of all, they consistently fail to think big. Whether the task is maximizing sales of lemonade, coffee, ice cream, mini-golf, massages, wedding dresses or Big Macs, their response is always to stand on the street handing out flyers and calling out to passersby encouraging them to try their wares. Ignoring what they learned in business or law school or in their own work experience, they resort to carnival barker principles when faced with their Apprentice tasks.
On the one hand, the show highlights the importance of good marketing. It doesn’t matter how good your product or service is, if you can’t get enough people to try it, you’ll never sell any product and you’ll quickly go out of business. However, The Apprentice is also a sad indictment of our industry.
When the losing team gets dragged into the boardroom to confess their sins to ‘The Donald’ (why, whenever I hear that phrase, do I think of a certain animated duck?), the spotlight is turned on the project manager for that task. And when the project manager is asked what went wrong, he or she invariably blames the person who was responsible for marketing - and with good reason. The show has been running for three seasons now and I struggle to think of an episode where they got the marketing right.
This kitschy reality show is reflecting the crisis in marketing that we’re suffering all over the world. As corporations grow larger and companies and markets increase their focus on short-term strategies for growth and increase in shareholder value, the influence of marketing at boardroom level is decreasing.
Marketers, meanwhile, have failed to show how marketing activities and costs influence shareholder value. This is because marketing management is not clear enough about its objectives. Although marketing managers use measures such as increases in sales and market share to evaluate campaigns and justify performance, as British marketing academic Peter Doyle writes, “Unfortunately, any first year economics student can demonstrate that such growth may as easily decrease, as increase, profits. Sales growth increases economic profits only if the operating margin on the additional sales covers the higher costs and investment incurred to achieve the growth. Chasing profitless growth has been one of the most common sources of corporate failure.”
Doyle points to research showing that more than half of companies identified as being excellent marketers demonstrate poor financial performance compared to their peers over the past decade, suggesting that excellent marketing is, in fact, poorly associated with financial success.
Doyle says there is “a paradox in how top management views marketing. On the one hand, marketing has become accepted as the central driver of shareholder value. Every world-class company now puts building long-term relationships with customers, based on satisfying their needs, at the forefront of strategy”. Yet while the central role of marketing in achieving competitiveness and creating shareholder value is undisputed, the role of marketing professionals appears increasingly questioned.
There is some work being done to address this by finding relevant ways of measuring the impact of marketing on company performance. In Australia, for example, the Australian Marketing Institute in 2003 commissioned the Centre for Applied Marketing at UNSW to draft guidelines for reflecting and accounting for the value created by marketing, and reporting the level of value creation to senior management.
Four broad areas for metrics have been identified: financial, general brand equity, innovation and employee-based. The Centre’s position is that there is no one set of metrics that should be uniformly used by all firms. It proposes that metrics should be linked to strategy, and if strategy is what sets a firm/brand apart from its rivals, then exactly the same metrics cannot apply to all companies.
The advent of websites and online marketing has the potential to deliver more of those hard metrics that will convince boards of the value of marketing. Note, however, that I said ‘potential’. Despite the fact that we collect an enormous amount of data online, we’re still not doing much useful with it.
On The Apprentice’s latest series, there were two people who called themselves online marketing executives. Both were voted off early in the season, largely because they were given marketing responsibility on several tasks and performed abysmally (one of them, the leisure-suit-wearing Danny, didn’t help matters by dragging out his guitar and composing a ditty about every task).
In the same way, many companies are turning toward their online marketing initiatives for data that can tell them whether and how their marketing is working. Unfortunately, the reality of useful marketing measurement has not yet caught up with the promise of online marketing.
There’s a real opportunity for marketing people who are willing to put the work into understanding how online data can be turned into knowledge and wisdom. If more people take this on, the marketing department will be less likely to be dragged into the boardroom to hear the words: “You’re fired!”
Simon van Wyk is managing director of HotHouse Interactive. Any resemblance between his hairstyle and Donald Trump’s is totally coincidental.