Comments on: Falling off the Bandwagon

By: Patricia

Patricia — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 17:27:29 +0000

Narrowing the discussion to tech marketing, specifically, I think it would be interesting and instructive to apply this discussion to the inferiority complex the marketing dept. often has in IT companies — especially at companies launched by engineers, as is common among dot-coms. These enterprises tend to populate their engineering, operations, finance staffs on the front end and consider marketing an add-on for the future. It’s no secret that many engineers view marketers with scorn. If corporate leaders don’t champion the value of marketing, that scorn becomes the dominant attitude and one that’s hard for marketers to overcome, particularly when they are latecomers to an established culture. Hence, inferiority.

By: jens

jens — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 16:12:02 +0000

no need for overindulging in inferiority complexes here.
provincialism is the nature of all associations. just look at the field of design or – well… the political parties.

By: Chris Kenton

Chris Kenton — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 15:34:12 +0000

That’s interesting. An ideal reality with little connection to their own…

The only time I see marketing associations facing reality in the larger social context is when the government starts threatening to regulate activities that cause an outcry among consumers, like spam, telemarketing, marketing to children, etc. It’s as if no one could have ever guessed that such aggressive activities would cause a backlash, and when that backlash comes, the focus is more on preventing regulation than creating strong guidelines for the profession.

I’ve got an example that I’ll post this evening…

By: Victor Cook, Jr., New Orleans, Louisiana

Victor Cook, Jr., New Orleans, Louisiana — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 13:32:02 +0000

The Provincialism of Small Functions

This morning, after seeing your post, I happened to read an article by Milan Kundera in the January 8, 2007 issue of The New Yorker titled “Die Weltliteratur.” With a little editorial freedom [reflected in brackets] I drafted this post from the section on “The Provincialism of Small Nations (page 30).” I think it offers some clues to the stubborn provincialism of the AMA.

In this article Kundera asks the question: how do you define provincialism? And answers “the inability (or refusal) to see one’s own culture in the large context.” He then says there are two kinds of provincialism. Translating the essence of these in the context of business management there are the “large and the small functions.”

The “large functions” like finance and accounting resist the ideas of marketing because “their own literature seems to them sufficiently rich that they need take no interest in what people write elsewhere.”

The “small functions” like marketing “are reticent toward the large context for exactly the opposite reason: they hold [the corporate role of marketing] in high esteem but feel it to be something alien, a sky above their heads, distant, inaccessible, an ideal reality with little connection to their own [provincial] literature.”

Further, a small function “inculcates in its [academics and practitioners] the conviction that he [or she] belongs to that place alone. To set his gaze beyond the boundary of the homeland, to join his colleagues in the [suprafunctional territory of the board room] is considered pretentious, disdainful of his own people. And since the [small functions] are often in situations where their survival is at stake, they can easily present this attitude as morally justified.”

As you say, it all comes down to leadership. Would the professional orginazation of a “small function” like the AMA allow a visionary leader to rise to the top? Not until the marketing discipline overcomes its inferiority complex.