The board of directors should have people with a marketing mindset. This article will analyze why marketing strategies are used for efficient corporate management.
The board of directors in a modern reality
The changing risk landscape and the need to increase business resilience in facing future challenges are pushing boards to rethink their role. The next generation of leaders – young people who will soon take over the reins of private or family businesses – will inherit operating models, institutions, and systems that performed well in the past. One such institution is the board of directors. Working in its composition is something that many of them should strive for and prepare for. Members of the new cohort of leaders who will soon, if not now, take a seat on the board of directors must ask themselves how to inject fresh energy into their work and how to ensure that their work contributes to a greater readiness of the entire organization for change.
The current board management model must be critically reassessed to serve a larger purpose and better address stakeholder needs. To do this, you need to take three important steps:
- Make business risk management and transformation planning a top priority.
- Ensure the diversity of the composition of the board of directors, which will attract people with the necessary skills in the field of business transformation to its ranks.
- Make a socially significant goal a key benchmark on the path to prosperity.
To begin with, you need to look at what the board of directors is like today, what awaits it tomorrow, and in what direction it should develop to remain in demand and bring benefits in the long term. Over the past few decades, many companies’ faces have changed beyond recognition. It is due to the development of global supply chains and the active penetration of technologies into the corporate environment, as well as to the emergence of new models that have contributed to such dramatic changes.
Marketing strategies for the board management
Some entrepreneurs argue that in a modern company, everyone should be a marketer. Thus, they emphasize that the company exists for the client, in the name of the client, and only as long as the client is satisfied with what the company offers him. Turning every employee into a marketer is too complex and unnecessary for many companies. But there should be people with a marketing mindset on the board of directors.
The board of directors is the strategic management body of the company. His task is to participate in developing the strategy, approve it, and then control its implementation. But the modern strategy is inconceivable without marketing, meaning that board members, if not supposed to be professional marketers, must at least think of the appropriate categories. And help management think the same way.
The concept of a business that exists for the sake of shareholders is long outdated. The proclamation of the priority of the interests of shareholders forces, including implicitly, the management to focus on the tasks of profitability, cost reduction, including those that undermine business development. After all, the interests of shareholders are often evaluated through financial indicators – net profit, EBITDA, earnings per share, dividends, etc. But profits and dividends only arise when a company has a satisfied customer.
The world of marketing research is large and diverse, and with the advent of the Internet, marketing tools have only expanded. Using modern research methods, a company can learn almost everything about its consumption, even if it lives or works thousands of miles away.