Fast forward

A new breed of marketing managers has emerged that manage mainly by forwarding e-mails.

In reality switching e-mails between people that actually implement work, who create, provide information and content, adds very little value to the marketing process. At best the intermediary marketing manager provides a useful link between an outside agency and people within the organisation that can provide the information required. Time and again we see an e-mailed request for information simply forwarded, often from an i-Phone, with a simple note added such as 'please answer this'. They then reply and the marketing manager forwards the response along with the whole chain of e-mails back to the original person requesting the information. Quite often this reveals interesting internal information that probably should not be sent outside the company. It also tips off who in the company is actually the relevant person to contact in future.

Of course at either end of this process someone needs to actually do some real work collating the information within the company and turning this into marketing collateral. The savvy marketing manager will however review the raw content first to check if it is appropriate and add a marketing insight that is consistent with marketing policy.