Having worked as a marketer for a while, it can still be a challenge to paint a picture of how all the parts of marketing work together. If you’ve got a strong visual model that makes sense of marketing, and how the parts work together, I’d be thrilled to see it.

I’d like such a picture because I often get asked questions like, how advertising works with public relations? And, if they’re both managed by a communications department? Or, how do community management and promotions interface? Are these both parts of customer relationship management? And, where does word of mouth marketing fit in?

These are all valid, and important questions that deserve an answer. I think a picture would help people pull apart the departments from the activities. I also think it would help people avoid thinking only in terms of departmental hierarchies, which are usually the organizational imperative. While hierarchies are a reality, marketing often works best when a set of roles check and balance each other. More like a heterarchy in a hierarchy:

I’m writing this post because I have yet to find the picture I’m looking for. I’ve already written about how going to the marketing page on Wikipedia won’t help sort any of this out. It’s sad that marketers don’t have their shit together enough to put up a decent page about themselves where these kinds of questions can be answered.

Though I have not yet drawn a picture of my own, I have explored a behavioral approach to the problem that could serve as the basis for such a visualization. I’ve tried to forget about what we call the parts of marketing and to simply think about what actually needs to get done. Perhaps the next step will be to connect each of these activities to a role within a company.

• Research the marketplace and who/what is there: (market research)
  • define market boundaries
  • inventory segments, demographics, sentiment, messaging, positions, pricing, practices, etc
• Analyze & report on the state of the market: (business intelligence)
  • identify opportunity spaces, overlap, gaps, adjacencies, similarities, differences, trends, and patterns.
  • package marketing intelligence for distribution within the organization
  • advocate for customer satisfaction.
• Foster community engagement: (marketing communications)
  • package and distribute information to empower community (internal and external)
  • develop and maintain a foundation for managing customer relationships
  • develop and maintain a platform to support ongoing conversations/research with community
• Ensure findability: (public relations / advertising)
  • participate in communities where there is interest in your organization’s products or services
• Innovate products and services (product marketing)
  • design products and services based on marketing opportunities and customer input
• Manage brand assets and knowledge: (knowledge management / community relationship management)
  • maintain, and make accessible, brand assets to support positioning
  • ensure consistent experience across touch-points