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O P I N I O N
“The companies that really make an effort to understand and embrace basic marketing knowledge will continue to grow and prosper regardless of the markets they serve.” Forgotten fundamentals of marketing
I have always said that the A/E business is a good 10-15 years behind the rest of American industry when it comes to marketing. But what I have discovered in the 15 years since the first time we sold the company (Zweig White) and I started teaching entrepreneurship at the Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas is that many privately-held companies of all types have plenty of room to improve their marketing and selling strategies, processes, and activities – not just architecture and engineering firms.
Mark Zweig
Why are we so behind? Besides the fact that many firms still don’t employ full-time, professionally- trained marketing staff, it’s the owners who are the problem. They don’t realize marketing is both an art and a science – and that it is a discipline with a body of knowledge just like whatever their own discipline base is. They also don’t really believe “it” (marketing) works to improve their business so they see spending money on it as a cost to be minimized rather than an investment in their company’s future ability to sustain itself. In their minds, the probability of their success as a business lies more in the economy overall and that of the specific markets or industries they serve. This is a dangerous belief, as many signs point to
potential slowdowns coming in many markets. If management thinks there’s little they can do to avoid workload declines in their firms it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. They will decline. And any company with owners who think they can manage that decline and stay profitable are kidding themselves. It is rare to see a firm in this business that cuts costs and shrinks quickly enough to stay profitable through significant revenue declines. It seems to me nearly everyone who owns or manages an A/E firm could benefit from a basic “Introduction to Marketing” course at their local business school. It certainly could provide some foundational knowledge about marketing that would impact everything they do.
See MARK ZWEIG, page 4
THE ZWEIG LETTER February 3, 2020, ISSUE 1330
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