Six Survival Strategies for the High-Tech Marketing Executive

As the heat gets turned up in companies to produce more with less, marketing is often the first group to get its toes scorched.

Why does this happen? Often it's because marketing's contribution to the bottom-line is just not evident to everyone. Increasingly, marketing executives find themselves on the ropes, struggling to justify investments, losing resources and dropping into a self-fulfilling spiral of ineffectiveness that weakens the entire company.

Six simple but powerful strategies can help you survive and prosper in today's dangerous high-tech management waters.

1. Don't take “no strategy” for an answer.

A company without a strategic plan--and there are many--is like a ship without a rudder. Everyone on board is in danger as the ship wanders aimlessly in a turbulent marketplace. Without a corporate strategy that guides marketing investments, companies create confused messages, poorly positioned products, and ineffective, costly programs that damage business and jeopardize marketing's credibility.

As the marketing executive, you have a vested interest in making sure a sound corporate strategy has been developed--even if you have to champion the effort yourself. Driving executive consensus around a core set of high-level business goals is a great start and provides value to all functional groups, not just marketing. It makes explicit the direction of the company so that programs can be planned intelligently and budgets set at optimal levels.

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Basil Harris, Jr. is the founder and president of MarketStreams (www.marketstreams.com), a strategic and product marketing consulting firm based in New Hampshire. He can be reached at bharrisjr@marketstreams.com