By M. Isi Eromosele

From the smallest local business to sprawling global enterprises, it’s the end of the art of marketing and the beginning of practicing marketing as a science. Gone are the esoteric theories of marketing as a creatively driven endeavor. Now is the time for an analytical

method that focuses on selling by engaging and closer interaction with the customer.

With the new paradigm, marketing will make investments, not gambles, and will make every effort to determine the return on those investments. You will have the opportunity to put your company a competitive edge, not just by spending your money wisely,

but also by embracing all of the elements of an information-driven global marketplace.

Your enterprise marketing management should be empowered by your desire to do whatever is necessary to drive profits higher. That desire alone will not suffice, though. You have to rethink how marketing will work for brand in the current fast paced, highly competitive global business environment.

Marketing is not all about creativity. A greater part of marketing has to do with tactical strategies and underlying activities. Marketing is a business. Marketing spending is an investment that should be expected to engender specific expected results that can be measured.

The following are absolutely essential to successfully implement the science of enterprise marketing:

Marketers often fail in three key categories:

Run Brands As Businesses, Not As Campaigns

The first step on the road to enterprise marketing management is to run your brands as businesses. Brands are much more than marketing campaigns, advertisements and logos.

Bring a brand-centric approach to the way you think about and manage your business. Use the knowledge of your customers to position your brands. Develop a deep understanding of the benefits that will really drive your customers to buy. Communicate what specific benefits your customers will derive from buying your brands.

These benefits should be organized into a brand architecture that clearly fleshes out the value the company creates and the key emotional and functional benefits it must communicate consistently to sell more products and services.

Manage Your Brand, Not Your Customer

Leveraging customer data to build brand architecture and plugging marketing in to the rest of the enterprise represent the right first steps. Take the value proposition spelled out in the brand architecture and translate it into a productive and profitable brand experience for your customers.

Creating this brand experience means marketing must develop the specific content and messages that are consistently delivered at every customer touch point. These touch points can be anything from a meeting with a salesperson to clicks on a web site.

This brand experience addresses all aspects of the way your company interacts with your customers, including downstream and post-purchase interactions concerning how to use or service what you sell.

Customer insights drive brand decision making and marketing investments. The term investment (rather than expense) connotes the way that marketing should function.

The customer insights that drive decision making must be both relevant and timely. Compiling such information is an enormous challenge for many companies, but it’s an imperative burden.

It’s critical that you understand the amount of marketing investment required to generate business with your target customers, as well as the amount of the return from doing business with those customers over time.

Consider creating a marketing investment profile. This profile indicates the timing of marketing investments and the timing of the returns, which in turn lets you monitor both the incremental and the cumulative ROI for specific marketing initiatives. It offers an immediate snapshot of the validity of your marketing investments.

The marketing investment approach, combined with creative drive, gives marketers an

even greater ability to build brand and drive value for their company. Marketing has to move beyond its traditional reliance on third-party media, such as TV or print ads, and put all of its customer touch points to work as sales drivers.

You have to put real changes in place, bringing together organization, culture, incentives, and information technology to make building and retaining a brand experience possible. Financial discipline and scientific rigor must take hold across every marketing decision.