Top 5 reasons why marketing leaders won’t change with the times

The other day my friend was venting his frustration about the marketing leaders in his company.

He works for an international conglomerate and their marketing is stuck in the 1990s. “Why can’t they change?” he asked. “They see the changes occurring. They know much of what they’re doing doesn’t work any more but I can’t seem to convince them to move ahead!”

This is a very common theme. Perhaps you’re experiencing this, too?

Changing a marketing culture is excruciatingly hard because there is usually an invisible scaffold propping up the old habits and keeping them in place. This structure threatens the viability of marketing effectiveness in this new consumer age.

Let’s dissect this scaffolding of marketing disfunction. Here are the top five reasons your marketing department can’t move forward:

5. Marketing leaders who don’t “look up”

Many marketing departments have been set in place years ago and now operate on auto-pilot.

An example: Last year, I was working with a Fortune 100 company on its U.S. marketing strategy. They had put a social media marketing content department in place in 2010 … which seemed like a pretty good idea at the time.