The “collapse” of big brand ‘marketing universities’ over the last twenty years has contributed to a “profound” recruitment issue, the CEO of insurance firm Hiscox USA has warned.
Steve Langan – whose marketing and management career spans Diageo, Coca-Cola and Nestlé – said over the last two decades a “crisis of marketing” had appeared, driven by major brands changing how they teach prospective marketers, as well as a perceived “fragmentation” of marketing as a discipline.
“It was easy in the 80s to recruit very well-rounded marketeers that were very business savvy; that could fully engage with the finance department on the P&L,” Langan said during the IPA’s Eff Week on Tuesday.
“However, marketing has fragmented hugely since then and it is now much more complex. You need to be a digital, social media or coms specialist…that has made it harder to recruit director level [marketing] generalists.”
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Langan also said that the UK’s traditional “marketing universities” have now “collapsed”.
“It’s profound and it’s not been commented on enough…you used to be able to study marketing under Proctor & Gamble in Newcastle upon Tyne, Cadbury in Birmingham, with Bass Brewers in Burton-upon-Trent, or Unilever in London – they were fantastic universities of marketing, but they’re now all gone, relocated to places like Geneva or Amsterdam.
Langan warned that these two issues have made the CMO’s relationship with the CEO much more difficult because they no longer sit at the heart of a business and have a poorer understanding of the financial operations.
Earlier this year, TSB Bank’s chief marketing and communications officer, Nigel Gilbert, said in too many businesses marketing spoke a “different language” to the rest of C-suite.
The remarks, made in March, highlighted an ongoing culture in which marketing was too often removed from the boardroom and “failed to explain itself.”
