Sorry about the dog

I’ve heard a lot of apologies lately. Sorry that your car doesn’t stop. Sorry that your train doesn’t go. Sorry to the sponsors, the fans and the wife (in that order). Sorry for the bad things that were written. Sorry for not being sorry soon enough. Sorry for not being sorry at all.

If you’d just landed from Mars you’d think that the business of marketing was about finding new and innovative ways to apologise (sorry, my UFO has left an intricate circle in your field). Which, for many marketeers, is probably not so far from the truth. It’s a symptom of a problem that many marketing departments have.

In too many organisations the marketing function is no more than the wagging tail of a much larger dog. It can only go where the dog goes, diligently following, hoping that the dog is good. When the dog behaves, the wagging tail may earn the dog a biscuit. But when the biscuit-giver gets bitten, no amount of wagging saves the dog from the kick that it will receive instead. When a business fouls up, no amount of saying sorry is going to make it better.

Where marketing departments need to be is in the creature’s brain. They need to be part of the decision about how to behave. And because marketing is about understanding behaviour, and the implications of that behaviour, it will therefore allow the brain to evolve. The creature becomes no longer a dumb dog but something much smarter. Something too intelligent than to bite the hand that feeds. I know I say this a lot, but for a business to truly succeed it must embrace marketing and creativity as board-level disciplines, fundamental to strategy and operations as a whole.

Of course even such creatively evolved businesses as Apple or Google will still make mistakes. But, as we’ve seen with the launch of Google Buzz this week, when things don’t go according to plan a profusion of apologies doesn’t need to follow. When your brain works as fast and as brilliantly as theirs, you can be forgiven the odd little nip.

So, to Toyota, Eurostar, Woods, Terry, Daily Mail, Vodafone, Toyota (again), Eurostar (again), RBS, HBOS et al, I make no apologies for sharing this point of view.