Patriot game

By Vincent Heeringa, May 30, 2006 @ midnight

Marketers: your country needs you, and you need each other

[Marketing]

For its size New Zealand is a poorly networked country. Maybe it’s because we don’t really need formal links—at some point you find that your colleague’s sister’s boyfriend is the same guy you played pool with on holiday in Taranaki. On the other hand, the lack of professional quality networking is a concern, and nowhere more than in the discipline of marketing. Talking to senior marketers in the last few weeks I’ve concluded that marketers don’t talk. I remember a conference organiser telling me that nobody ever turns up to marketing events. For years marketers have had no professional body.

Late last year the Direct Marketing Association filled the vacuum by dropping the D to become simply the Marketing Association. It’s a great idea but chief executive Keith Norris points out he can get 200 direct marketers to a 7am breakfast event but it’s near impossible to get the more than 20 senior marketers into one room.

What’s going on? And does it matter? “At least one problem is that we have so few peers,” reckons Kevin Kenrick, general manager of Telecom Mobile and formerly a marketer with Lion Breweries and Carter Holt Harvey. “Most marketers in New Zealand work for foreign brands. They are essentially implementing a system that comes from HQ overseas. There are very few homegrown brands that have to cut it in the way we do.”

Vivien Sutherland Bridgewater, marketing director of AUT University, says the tendency is to specialise—so her professional development is focused on issues to do with tertiary education.

And anyway, she says, it’s a very creative job. “Once you know the discipline, it is then actually about recognising talent and creative ideas, and communicating across and upwards within an organisation.” In other words: a little less talk and a little more action. That’s cool. I like the idea of a profession of quiet achievers.

Except for one thing—it’s not working. AUT University and Telecom are rare exceptions; both are locally owned and both are growing their market share. For the most part, New Zealand companies have lost or are losing to overseas competition. Think of the growing dominance of foreign, and particularly Aussie, brands in banking, insurance, retail, travel, supermarkets, media, advertising and packaged goods.

“New Zealand is bit-by-bit becoming the plaything of foreign interests.”

We’re also failing at exporting. Exports as a proportion of GDP have remained fairly static for the last 40 years. So has the mix of exports—it’s still mostly commodities. It was fashionable for a while in the 1990s to talk about the export-led recovery. It hasn’t happened.

New Zealand is bit-by-bit becoming the plaything of foreign interests. The victory of the foreign invasion is easy to see: it’s in our balance of payments deficit, which last month was the largest ever.

What is the role of marketing in this demise? It’s this. New Zealanders have historically been superb at inventing and innovating. Our legacy is in farm-based tinkering. We fail in commercialisation, which in essence is marketing. We’re not without the skills: every year we find homes for a growing mountain of butter and an endless volume of milk powder. Lamb has turned from ground mince to gourmet meals. The hottest New York vodka now comes from Wellington.

I suspect there’s a disconnect between the best and the rest. An agenda for change would look something like this:

• We need to lift the quality of networking. Join the Marketing Association today.
• We need media that takes marketing seriously. Subscribe to Idealog and join the conversation online.
• We need better marketing knowledge and local case studies.
• We need some patriotic fire in the belly of our marketing graduates.

Every profession believes it’s the most important. I’ve never met a lawyer with a deflated sense of importance. Designers have recently tried to convince us that design is a ‘key enabler’ for Kiwi success worldwide. That’s great but it’s time for marketing to assert itself. No one is beating the door to New Zealand products and services. We need them to. Marketers: rise up.

Vincent Heeringa is a founder of Idealog