Marketers speak a language that is neither consistent nor relevant to other managers....


So it's no wonder that marketing is misunderstood and underappreciated in most organizations. Let's address consistency now; relevancy is for another time.
Consider the most overused word in business: "strategy." When marketers use the word in your organization, what do they mean?
Would they refer to "strategy" as any communications approach or method...as apparently McKinsey (the highly regarded management consulting organization) does, as we read in a recent article about call centers .
Or would strategy be used to refer to who you are targeting or how you can beat the competition?
When the editorial team at MarketingProfs surveys its readers to learn about topics of greatest interest, marketing strategy always comes out on top. Problem is... the editors don't know what the readers mean, exactly.
If marketers use the word "strategy" in your organization, do they always mean the same thing? If not, you want to clean that up.
As Allen Weiss has written, and, as he and I write in Marketing Champions, our forthcoming book from John Wiley, inconsistent language is the surest way to kill your marketing strategy.