This is the inaugural guest post from Matt Granfield. At first, I didn’t like Matt. He is opinionated, a marketer and from Queensland. Oh, and he thinks I’m a fascist. But Matt is one of the most switched on, passionate, complex and intriguing folk I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know. He knows a lot about a lot and doesn’t hesitate to share his insights and advice. And he has a band. That’s cool too. Enjoy – Karalee.

I’m a marketer. I run a specialist agency inside an advertising agency which helps brands make the most of the digital world. I’ve run digital agencies for most of the naughties but I actually studied communications and began my career in Public Relations at the ABC. I worked as a journalist for Rupert Murdoch for a heady six months and now, in my spare time, when I’m not buying things I don’t need, I write for Marketing Magazine. It would be fair to say that I’ve seen the way brands interact with the world from pretty much every angle.  I’m guessing that’s why Karalee asked me to pop by, drop a few thoughts into her wordpress and see what popped out.

The problem, you see, the reason I’m writing, is departments. They exist for various reasons, and sometimes they makes things easier, but generally, they operate as separate cogs spinning inside a machine which would invariably go much faster and run much smoother if the cogs thought to connect with each other from time to time.

The marketing department exists to draw up the graphs and brief the advertising agency and talk about the KPIs and make up big words and bitch about how it doesn’t have enough money.

The advertising agency exists to do basically the same thing. Except the advertising agency spends most of its time bitching about how boring the marketing department is and how the product development department is clinically insane.

The public relations department, or agency, or person, is there to write press releases about how there isn’t a crisis. Occasionally the marketing department will sponsor something and they get to write press releases about that too, but generally speaking, they’re there to write press releases about how there isn’t a crisis.

The customer service department is there so when someone rings and complains about something they don’t get told to fuck off. They could actually be really good at marketing, or PR, or advertising, because they’re the ones who actually talk to the customers all day, but no one with a marketing, PR or advertising degree wants to work in customer service because that would mean getting paid a minimum wage to give people the run around and deliver them miles from where they really wanted to go. It’s not a coincidence that customer service hotlines and taxi drivers sound pretty much the same.

The departments would piss on each other if they were on fire of course, but only because the CEO might be looking and there might be another zero on the budget for their next pet project in it for them. Departments suck. Departments suck because universities and career paths have taught people to choose between them. Departments suck because good ideas have to pass through them, and when they come out the other end they look like Picasso paintings. Painted by primary school children.

If I had my way, and one day I will, I would ban departments.

You see, the problem with marketing departments is that they don’t like to actually do anything for themselves. They like to pay advertising agencies exorbitant sums of money to make television commercials that yell at people. The only thing they like doing more than that is firing advertising agencies when the sales department says the yelling didn’t work. What they really should be doing is listening to what their consumers are saying, door-knocking every night like politicians, asking lots of questions all the time, meeting the people who buy their products and inviting them in to their office to see how they’d do things differently. This, is, of course, hard work. Hard work is hard. And nowhere near as much fun as being bought lunch by advertising agency account directors.

The problem with advertising agencies (the ‘advertising department’ if you will) is that they are full of the kinds of people who aren’t good enough at making graphs to be marketers and are either too materialistic or not creative enough to make anything useful, like a novel, or a song, or a painting.  They hate marketing departments, but they live with them because marketing departments are stupid, lazy and, from time to time, erupt cash. If they had their way they would never have to listen to anyone, they’d just be allowed to shout their ideas from billboards high above the city and then disappear into their ivory towers to watch Mad Men, drink scotch and quietly wish it was still 1962.

The problem with PR departments is that nobody takes them seriously until there is a crisis. They sit in the corner, or in another suburb, or in another city and don’t have the clout or the respect to make anyone do anything differently, when in actual fact they hold the key to understanding the very people, the only people, who keep the brand in existence: the public.

Public Relations departments should be given the biggest chairs, the biggest offices, the biggest budgets and the biggest pay cheques because they’re the only ones whose job it technically is to engage the people who buy the shit/services/shit-services the company sells. But they’re never allowed to do that. They’re never allowed to have a real conversation with anyone. From time to time they’ll be allowed to put on an event of course, a party full of promo models, catering and a representative sample of the target market who’ve either won a competition or had a byline in the local paper at some stage. They might even plan the party in conjunction with the marketing department, they might even get to meet someone from the advertising agency at the after party party, but that’s as close as they’ll get. The next day they’ll be shoved back into the corner with their email database and their signed football jersey and told to write a press release about the advanced oxygenising properties of the new blue widgets.

Banning marketing, advertising and PR departments would be a brilliant idea. The walls should be torn down and they should all be made to work in the same room, at the same desk, sharing the same computer.

It’s not going to happen though, because CEOs wouldn’t understand the concept and everyone would have to lose their egos. No one would buy it, no one would want to give up the concepts in the textbooks they read at university. No one would want to actually do some work and listen to the customers.

There is a solution though. They say that, short of actually sleeping with someone, you can never actually understand a person until you walk a mile in their shoes. So give it a shot. Don’t be shy. At the work Christmas party this year, swap shoes with that hottie from the other department you’ve always had your eye on. See how it feels. Trot around for a bit after a few martinis and see what it feels like to be a gear in the same machine. Or better still, and I like this plan a lot more, walk a mile in the hottie from the another department’s shoes after you’ve picked them up from the floor of your bedroom the day after the Christmas party, right before you’ve called them a cab. I guarantee you’ll get a much better perspective of their cog.

Be sure the taxi driver doesn’t see the both of you leaving your house at the same time though; he probably just got a job in the customer service department.

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