The Tribune

By D'ARCY RAHMING

ABOUT 15 years ago I used to be a chief financial officer (CFO) at a major Bahamian retail company. This was before I dedicated myself to learning how to market. The brand managers had to present budgets to my department. I was never quite sure what their budgets were based on. It seemed to me that these brand managers were huge money wasters. I could not understand how throwing all of these little parties or events, as they called them, had any use at all. I certainly could not understand what giving the product away for free had to do with increasing profits.

Back then, if given the chance, I would cut a marketing budget. So imagine my shock one day when I was summoned to the chairman's office, which was rarely a good thing. The chairman told me in no uncertain terms that he could not care less about me and my staff of accountants and administrators. Sales and marketing were the only things that were keeping the company running. He suggested that if I wanted to find budget cuts, try cutting the staff I had.

I was insulted and shocked, and it took me a while to realise he was trying to educate me, to mentor me and to get some use out of me. The lesson he was trying to teach me is that a company must be marketing and sales driven to survive. When you stop advertising and marketing, you are going to be out of business pretty soon. While accounting is a necessity to help manage the business, it does not bring in any money, unless you are selling accounting services. My job was one of support.

This is something they do not tell you in MBA school when you are studying finance. Either that or I must have been asleep that day. Never stop advertising. But, in fairness to those with a purely financial and accounting background, I believe there is a good reason why it takes a while to understand that marketing and sales should drive a company. If you are a regular reader of this column, you probably guessed what I'm going to say: The marketing guys don't really do a good job of quantifying their efforts.

Many will argue that quantifying marketing and advertising is not an exact science, and you may never know which part - or even combination - of your marketing is driving customers into your door. This point I vehemently disagree with, but I concede it is better to have the wheat and the chaff (good marketing and bad marketing) together as long as there is continued sales growth. Only then should you begin to measure the effectiveness of the campaigns and prune off those parts that are not working. So whatever you do, never stop advertising!

NB: D'Arcy Rahming holds a Masters of Management from the J. L. Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. A lecturer at the College of the Bahamas, Mr Rahming has clients in general insurance, retail, the health and medical fields, sports federations and financial services. To receive his marketing newsletter FREE go to http://DArcyRahming.com or contact him directly at darcyrahmingsr@gmail.com