Anyone Want To Fund A Chair At The D.L. Menard School of Marketing?

I love Cajun music. Now, I realize Cajun music is really just polkas with fiddles and steel guitars instead of wind instruments, so, by extension, there is no reason why properly played Polish polkas should not be every bit as cool as Cajun songs, but I love Polish polkas too, so at least my yin equals my yang in the ethnic-music department.

One of the all-time greats in Cajun music is D.L. Menard. D.L. Menard is no relation to John Menard, the genius behind the Menard hardware chain and the bankroll behind his son's rotten racing career. However, D.L. has it all over John when it comes to knowing his marketing.

My favorite D.L. Menard album, both from a musical and marketing standpoint, is titled "No Matter Where You At, There You Are."

Think about that from a marketing standpoint. Marketers expend a tremendous amount of effort trying to deal with the crisis at hand. On the ground, most of the true marketers I know spend 80 percent to 90 percent of their time dealing with the fire du jour. The rest of the time they're in meetings, getting excoriated for not moving the organization forward.

I have a good marketing friend who is ostensibly a product developer -- and he'd be a crackerjack product developer if he'd ever get a break from fighting fires long enough to develop a few.

Hey, you can't move the organization forward if you're always dealing with the here. In D.L. Menard's terms, you can't be where you are and where you're not at the same time.

And you want to know the funny thing? If you don't deal with where you at you're still going to be there ... because, according to the D.L. Menard School Of Marketing, no matter where you at, there you are. So you may as well move the organization forward.

Now, this is not a call to indolence. I'm not saying every Tom Marketer, Dick Marketer and Jane Marketer should respond to a call for instantaneous action by saying, "Sorry. I'm focused on moving the organization forward for the next, oh, five years."

That's not in most marketers' DNA, for one thing. In my experience, marketing people and engineers actually get things done in organizations. Everyone else is along for the ride, more or less.

However, it is an encouragement to meet those constant requests for fire-fighting with something like, "Okay, but if I do x I can't do y. Which is more important to the organization?"

The assumption most non-marketing people make about marketing people is because they can do x, y, and z, they should be doing x, y, and z, and right this minute.

Well, sorry. Take a number. If you leave it up to the marketers, the good ones will do what is best in their view for the organization, no matter how hard it is or how long it takes. The bad ones will do whatever looks the best to the most people. The plodders will do whatever's on top of the pile.

However, all marketers, when given the chance, will move the organization forward. The engineers too. There's a lot of sense in leaving both these groups to their business and spreading the aggravation earmarked for them among other entities in the company.

Assuming you want to be somewhere other than where you are, that is.