Many business leaders I encounter try to set themselves apart from their competitors by making a strong statement about their company’s business process, even if it’s about something as simple as how they do their billing. By making a bold statement, they are in essence making a statement that’s hard to ignore.
In the case of companies like Google, this statement could be pretty simple: we bill every time we use a search engine. We use a lot of search engine advertising, and we try to get as many people to click on that ad as possible. However, we are aware that we are being wasteful with our ad dollars, and we will do all we can to reduce our exposure to ads.
Google is doing an astonishingly good job of keeping out the ad dollars. It’s doing it so that we can make ads that drive their ads.
This is a relatively simple problem to solve. There are many systems that can be used to make this happen. We have the infrastructure, we have the legal staff, we have the marketing team, and we have the advertising team. We’ve tried to do it in a way that is financially sustainable as well.
When a company does something that we can’t do, we don’t have the space to do it. We have a great team of people who will do whatever they can to make it happen. It’s all about you being able to do it.
Most successful companies have in-house marketing and advertising departments. They are able to get the resources they need to achieve their goals and make it happen. In some sense, the whole idea of advertising is about being able to tell people about your company, not what you say about your products.
That said, companies are still in business development mode. They do not have the same freedom they did a few years ago. They still have to make the best possible product with the best possible price for the customer. They have to be able to make money.
You can tell a lot about a company by looking at their marketing department. They are the ones who spend the most time in the back office. It’s no surprise that this is one of the top three departments in any company (with top three managers), followed by sales (twice as high) and production (twice as high).
Marketing is also the one department that is most under-invested in business systems development. Not because it is under-invested (to be clear, marketing is over-invested), but because it spends far more time on this than the other departments combined. The reason is that marketers are the ones who create the most products and sell the most stuff. Marketing is the most efficient department of any business that makes money.
This is all well and good, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore marketing. Marketing is absolutely vital for business systems development. It makes sure the products that are created and sold are of the highest quality, and it is the only department that can afford to buy new technology. That’s why it is the one department that invests the most money in software.
