Note to CMO: Is Marketing Getting Outsourced?

Dear CMO:

Do you need a new logo? Go to Logoworks and for $199 you'll have one within a few days. Do you need a survey done? Zoomerang will give you statistically relevant sample sizes within a day or so. How about television advertising, from creative to media placement? Spot Runner. Need a business plan written? Try PR Store -- just walk in to one of their retail storefronts. Same thing with IT management to website development. All you need is a credit card.

Do you need someone to manage all these outsourced agencies that do all the work that full time employees used to do? Go pick someone up at Crimson Consulting or M Squared, depending on your location. Maybe BlueChip.

Did I miss the memo or did marketing get outsourced while I was busy?

I'm really fascinated by what I'm seeing in this space of "productizing creative" for the small to medium business market (and even into the enterprise). What used to be a process laden with overhead just became a Marketing 2.0 web-based just-enter-your-credit-card-here activity.

As with many outsourced processes, this is likely to shake out. We've seen cases where going to the lowest priced alternative has backfired. Ask Dell about their Indian call centers, for example. Cultural fluency is more important than linguistic skill. But tapping into creative talent that might be elsewhere for a lot less certainly has its allure. If you've seen the creative done in Shanghai, for example, you'd love to get that kind of work for the $6K a year the creative director is probably making. If it were only that easy. It isn't. And time zone differences are only the beginning.

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Key Takeaways:

> Some things can't be done by others, like creating your brand, your vision and your go-to-market strategy. You can outsource the processes and many of the deliverables in these activities, but you can't outsource what makes you "you."

> If you're managing for the long haul, you will want to promote from within, not from free agency. The best companies do and many of the worst don't. Cultures are what define companies and what dictate your success in them. So outsourcing your next generation of leaders will probably create your next generation of competitors.

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Where does this trend logically begin and end? I'm not under the impression that this is the end of the world for marketing as we know it -- far from it, I think it's a great idea and can think of many ways to take advantage of it -- but I'm curious to scope it out.

Are we entering an age of having to make "tastes great -- less filling" choices for filling functional management roles?

If you're about to embark on a web-based certification program that requires a skill set you don't exactly have in-house, that needs to be branded, and needs to be delivered to several thousand people in the next few months, you need to look at this now -- you're getting measured on results, not looks -- so faster might be better.

Do you call your staffing manager over in HR or do you just fire up your browser?


Regards.



Copyright (c) 2007 Stephen Denny