“Marketing Tech Use Lags,” by BtoB Magazine contributing editor Richard Karpinski reports that IDC‘s CMO Advisory Practice is issuing a study that finds inadequate technology planning and investment in marketing departments.

IDC Research Vice President Michael Gerard has indicated that for marketers, planning is not a continuous process but an isolated event; however, it should indeed be continuous.  With less than 2% of a marketing budget being invested in marketing applications, many marketers with under $1B in revenue (77%) “either used Microsoft Excel or had no technology planning tool at all.”   Forty percent of companies with over $3B in revenue  only use Excel.  And planning gets squeezed into the last minute because Marketing is fighting so many other fires.

When the Marketing Consigliere says “ERP!” it doesn’t mean he’s having indigestion from too much eggplant parmigiana.  While there are many wonderful SaaS based tools that marketers can adopt quickly to help them in their daily tasks, the overall health of the firm depends on their ability in a leadership capacity to coordinate their overall IT needs with other departments in the organization.

This is a network-centric marketing world and Marketing departments cannot afford to keep themselves shut in a decaying silo. Some people get confused when the Marketing Consigliere conjures up the military acronym C⁴ISR to describe how to see marketing technology, but he is sticking to his guns (no pun intended).  He is after all, a “War” Consigliere also.  And Marketing is war. Capitalism is a like bloody battlefield with carcasses all over the field and your enemies are direct competitors and substitutes for your products and services.

In this war and in these new times, the organization with the better ability to gather, analyze, share, and act upon data will “win,” just like in the military. C4ISR Marketing is the way to go and planning outside your silo with other departments is key to this transformation.  In 2009, this blog will be talking more about Marketing Resource Management (MRM) and Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) applications, but these are more marketing operations oriented and not part of the “front end” that IDC is talking about.   So get planning – before your organization is one of the carcasses on the battlefield.