Some time ago, I saw an American study cited that explained the high number of commercial failures in new consumer products by the fact that executive boards of major corporations spend less than 10% of their time discussing marketing options.
According to the authors, despite marketing innovation and creativity being touted as a critical competitive advantage for business success, it is rare to find a true specialist on the board of directors of large corporations. Without a marketer at the top of the organization, one would expect a significant portion of board meeting time to be dedicated to understanding, deliberating, and deciding on marketing issues. However, statistical analysis of executive agendas revealed that such matters only exceptionally rise to the board’s scrutiny.
If this is the landscape in America—the homeland of global brands and products—what must it be like in Portugal, a country with an evident and historical difficulty in selling finished products to final consumers abroad?
I believe that in most Portuguese companies, marketing issues are only now beginning to acquire true strategic relevance, moving out of the category of minor topics usually delegated to intermediate responsibility levels. In some cases driven by the entrepreneur’s personal taste, in others by the benign contagion of competition, and more rarely by structured and conscious business criteria, marketing is rising to the executive boards. It is acquiring the logical priority it should have always held: as a source of market knowledge and mastery, with a powerful impact on sales and business profitability.
Observing the naivety of certain Portuguese business practices, one could almost argue that worse than having no marketing at all is having “pretend marketing”—calling marketing a function based on “gut feeling and guesswork” rather than being seriously grounded in data and quantified reflections on the real possibilities of selling something and making money from it.
The lack of a tradition in marketing among domestic companies is a direct consequence of the economic model historically followed in our country. We have never been a people of competitive commerce or sellers of finished goods to the final consumer. If we look even today at the ranking of the largest national exporting companies, we find that little or nothing has essentially changed in this domain. Those who produce in Portugal and sell to the world are either foreign companies or manufacturers of intermediate goods in technological sectors who practically do not need consumer-facing marketing.
Of course, marketing is also learned through imports. In domestic distribution, there is competition, making it necessary to correctly solve marketing equations to succeed. However, the marketing knowledge used in those circumstances is also imported for local execution—either because it is embedded in the product or because it is a requirement of the distribution contract.
Why, then, do we continue to suffer from such a significant deficit of marketing knowledge in our companies, with the obvious consequence of having an extremely weak export position in products or services geared toward final consumers? The question is simple, but the answer is complex.
First, we must acknowledge that the largest Portuguese companies remain centered on non-tradable businesses. When the major cash flow generators in a country do not need marketing, it means they fail to invest in that competence to the point of appropriating it as a core management skill.
Second, small and medium-sized enterprises are born and developed around a core baseline of knowledge—usually held by the owner or entrepreneur—which is sufficient to make money and accumulate personal wealth, but fails when the business attempts to scale. At that critical moment of ambition and growth, the business owner refuses to trade their certainties founded on past success for outside expertise promising future success, because doing so would mean losing power and having to share results.
Third, the public system of business support has privileged emergency financial aid, gross fixed capital formation, or external promotion support—interesting aspects, but hardly critical for developing autonomous, sales-generating marketing.
What, then, can help Portuguese marketing develop and create concrete value within companies, serving business owners and the country by improving sales and profit results?
I believe the first and most decisive step on this path will be taken by companies that possess the capability and willingness to incorporate into their management functions an effective capacity to understand, debate, and judge marketing proposals—dedicating the necessary time to them and assigning them the reward deserved by their results.
Paulo Fidalgo
CEO of Marketividade
