What are the challenges that a modern marketing manager faces? What has given rise to these challenges?
Marketing has lost its edge. Around the world, organisations are questioning the necessity of having a marketing department. The marketing manager today is hard-pressed to answer the hard-hitting questions put to him by the CEO. How many new customers have you brought to the company? How much business value has your marketing efforts delivered? How much of the company s profits is purely the contribution of marketing? And so on. Clearly, the traditional marketer has no available data to be able to justify his role in the organisation. Add to this the exponential increase in the difficulty levels of marketing to today s highly informed consumer. Seth Godin in his path-breaking book Permission Marketing points out that the average urban consumer faces a barrage of over a million advertising and marketing communication messages in a day. The barrage starts in the morning when you open your newspaper while having your cup of tea. Then as you hit the road to work, the entire urban landscape
