Marketing Profs

Roy Young and David Stewart are coauthors, with Allen Weiss, of Marketing Champions: Practical Strategies for Improving Marketing's Power, Influence, and Business Impact (Wiley, 2006). The three have collectively logged about 100 years' worth of experience in marketing. Roy is the Director of Strategy and Development at MarketingProfs and serves as a consultant and coach to marketing executives. Allen is the founding publisher of MarketingProfs and Professor of Marketing at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. David is the Robert E. Brooker Professor of Marketing at the Marshall School and the editor of the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science.

Here, Roy and David answer 10 questions about their new book:

1. When did you first come up with the notion of "marketing champions"? And what in the world made you decide to write an entire book about them?

Roy: I was originally inspired to think more about marketing champions when I read Allen Weiss's short article on MarketingProfs.com, "Why Marketing Gets No Respect." I felt that the situation—the lack of respect for marketing professionals—needed more attention and a lengthier response to how marketers could address the problem. The field seemed to be crying out for a prescription for marketers to learn how to win respect and gain a seat at the strategy table.

I also became aware of a lot of myths about marketing that non-marketing managers circulate—such as "marketing is only about advertising" and "marketing is about tactics, not strategy."

I looked around for a book that dispels these myths, and couldn't find any. So the idea emerged for doing the book ourselves—not only to shatter those destructive myths but also to provide guidelines for marketers to better articulate the value they create for their companies.

2. Who would you elect as the ultimate marketing champion?

Dave: No single person comes to mind as the ultimate marketing champion. But you can certainly point to the usual suspects who would qualify as champions in most people's minds.

Many of them have become celebrities by virtue of their role in their company—they manage multimillion-dollar ad budgets and have enormous clout—rather than their actual accomplishments.

Roy: True marketing champions may be celebrities and occupy high-profile positions in their firms, but they also generate visible and measurable value for their companies. They might take unusual, creative approaches to introducing new products, clarifying marketing's impact on the company's bottom line, using the media in new ways to get the company's message out to an audience, or building bridges between marketing and other functions.