PROFILE: Senior Marketer, Corporate

In a larger organisation, the marketing department consists of a team of marketers who have complimentary administrative and strategic skills. Senior marketers are often strategic planners who are guiding the company.

Under their leadership, junior staff are collecting market research, research competitors and execute and administer the marketing plan. Brand development and advertising in most cases is outsourced. Corporate Marketing’s overarching objective is stewardship of the brand.

PROFILE: Senior Marketer, SME

In SME’s this is usually a combined skill set resting within one person. This person should have both, administrative and strategic skills. This is very difficult to find, as the marketing field requires a large set of skills and people tend to specialise in one of the areas of marketing expertise as typically required by larger organisations. Often SME senior marketers have a stake in the company and spearhead their investment.

Senior marketers are on board either from the early start-up phase or when the company hits the financial glass ceiling where further growth is only possible with customer relation management, positioning strategy and regular budgeting. SME owners have to identify whether the marketer has the right skill set to transit from strategic to administrative task set and back.

We commonly see  job ads asking one marketer ‘to design ads’, ‘create brochures’ write marketing plans’, ‘liaise with sales teams’,  ‘conduct research’ and ‘manage events’. The ‘on a shoestring, one size fits all, versatile and exciting busy role’ approach is asking for the amalgamation of ‘Graphic Designer’, ‘Marketing Manager’, ‘Marketing Analyst’ and ‘Events Coordinator’ in one person.

Would you trust the effective and timely delivery of your service order from one single person attempting to explore, survey, mine, quote and sell gold from the mine you own? In the next part we discuss more on the profile of SME marketers.

However, somehow in the midst of ‘doing’, firms often can’t define or emphasise their competency in such ways that it would give them competitive advantage in the market. To improve the competitive advantage, we suggest to clients to look into three areas of strategic planning. The firms’ core competencies need to be identified, Market trends to be scouted for and competitor intelligence need to gathered to arrive at meaningful strategic planning outcomes.

This is where we ask- who is doing it? In smaller firms, marketing is often understaffed or not at all present. Increasing organisational capability is becoming vital if any firm wants to grow or expand. How would you know that your invested dollars are giving you return? The role of marketing in your organisation needs to be seen clearly. We encounter very different types of marketing personnel in organisations, not always with the set of skills required to identify competitive advantage for the company. In our upcoming posts, we will discuss some of the different ‘marketer types’ we think of.

Business goodwill is a key intangible asset that represents the portion of the business value that cannot be attributed to other business assets.

(Btw: For a quick definition on institutional, professional, practice and practitioner goodwill, see for example here or Wikipedia.)

IA’s are according to this:

• Intangible assets can be identified and described. They must be a specific property, not an idea.
• Intangible assets are legal property. Just as tangible assets, the owners can assert their legal rights to and defend their possession of intangible assets.
• Ownership of intangible assets can be transferred. For example, the owners can sell them or give them away.
• Evidence of intangible existence. Documentation is a typical way to establish that. Examples are customer lists, blueprints, contract documents, software source code printouts.
• Intangible assets have a life span.

Why is it locked out of the definition of an intangible asset when all you have to do is follow through with this logic and place ‘idea’ in the above bullet points? So tell me, what did my last idea not do to increase business value?

I carried it around, I gave it to somebody, I wrote it down, it got me a good reputation, I was paid for it and in the end it might be a good one to keep for solving a specific problem in the organisation later on. A bit of goodwill, anyone?

Parts of the organisation traditionally dealing in ‘tangibles’ are the finance and sales departments. HR and Marketing are the domain of the intangible asset.

The process of developing a linear intangible asset chain can be described in this model. They are presented here as linear, because in my experience, setting them in random order is not creating sustainable competitive advantage in the long-term. Step 3 to 7 are intrinsically linked and are more like layers than consecutive steps as they are initiated simultaneously.

intangible asset chain

1. The process of naming the company
2. The process of trademarking
3. The process of defining the corporate identity
4. The process of inducting employees to the corporate identity and marketing strategy
5. The process of product/services development
6. The process of defining the target market and target demographics
7. The process of communicating with internal and external stakeholders
8. The process of determining brand equity

It was my observation that if the start-up company had not followed through with the linear building of this intangible asset line, sales were either stagnating or did not attract the appropriate buyers if the company tried to employ a price skimming strategy.

Premature investment in corporate identity creation before the naming process or product development before the research into target markets led in all instances to reconsideration and further financial and time investment.

Research has found that adequate financial resources help secure the tangible side of things on which intangibles can be build. Increased development funding is a start-up competitive advantage, because augmented financial resources are used to increase firm assets (Lee, Lee, and Pennings 2001, 619).

However, consider that, simply possessing resources does not translate them into value (Priem and Butler 2001). Firms achieve value creation by gaining, combining and utilizing resources (Grant 2002).

It is therefore important to map out the steps on how to create their intangible asset chain when start-up businesses of any industry enter the market. For more information and a graphic of the Consensio Intangible Asset Chain, please contact Consensio or leave a comment.

We strive to match Plato’s world view when we describe the intangible as follows: we interpret the world in terms of archetypes (good-bad, beauty-ugly, single-multi, intangible-tangible, asset-non-asset…).We strive to define it by using changeless absolutes and look for the essence of universal truth and structure about ‘intangible assets’.

We ask what is the precise relation between the pattern of ‘intangible asset’ and the empirical world of everyday reality. Why is this important to the way we do business 2000 years later?

In scholarly debate, intangible assets (IA) are often defined as…

…including those factors that are nonphysical sources of economical benefit and are rarely, if at all included in the firm’s financial statements… Intangible resources include intellectual property, culture, reputation and know-how. The researchers found that investment in these asset groups are indeed of competitive advantage to firms (Galvin & Galbreath 2006,152).

By ascertaining the underlying patterns of things we are researching the meaning of IA. We are actually chasing Plato’s archetype of IA, the ‘veiled essence of things‘ by looking at its embodiment in non-physical sources of intellectual property, culture, reputation and know-how.

Rational philosophy forms insights but it remains an example and representation and leads further down the track to classification and compartmentalization that is cutting off what businesses in the 21st century need the most- creativity and ideas.

“There is currently no Australian Accounting Standard that comprehensively deals with intangible assets. However there are general requirements contained in a number of standards that are applied to intangible assets.“

And then the policy goes on to explain:

“The main impact of this standard on ACT Government agencies is in relation to software, as this is the only material intangible asset that is held by the ACT.“

I’m asking you- how is something “material intangible”? According to a Princeton definition it can be one or the other…If you take away the physical code of this asset, it won’t function. Operating systems in this definition are described as tangible (they are make of code, too) but application software isn’t. But for classifying reasons (and tax purposes?), we can look at it any way we want, I suppose. Further down in this defining policy:

“Internally generated brands, mastheads, publishing titles, customer lists and items similar in substance shall not be recognised as intangible assets. This is because expenditure on these internally generated intangibles cannot be distinguished from the cost of developing the business as a whole. Therefore, such items are not recognised as intangible assets”.

Brands are NOT defined as intangibles. Wow! Al these scholars who define IA’s as …must clearly not be thinking of the same thing as the policy makers in NSW!