Marketers, Wake Up! So Says Larry Light
Larry Light earned his marketing chops when, as global chief marketing officer for McDonald’s from 2002 through 2005, he helped the fast food giant rejuvenate its brand image, and its bottom line, by reconnecting with customers and bring many of them back to the Golden Arches. Today Light runs his own management consulting firm, Arcature, and he’s not happy about what he’s seeing in the marketing world.
Marketers are getting too caught up in the tools they use and not thinking big picture, as well as not thinking about the role they serve as the voice of customers within their organizations, Light tells me in a podcast I did with him recently as a prelude to his scheduled talk at AMA’s SMART xChange conference May 5-7 in Chicago.
“Instead of marketing evolving, marketing is devolving,” Light says. Chief marketing officers today are spending a disproportionate share of their time “managing and executing marketing communications. Rather than being a business leader they have become a marketing communications implementer,” Light argues.
His advice: “The one thread that crosses every silo (in an organization) is what does the customer want and marketing should be the voice of that customer,” Light says.
Listen to the podcast to hear more and come to SMART xChange to hear Light and a lineup of other impressive speakers too.
