About Us
What we’re doing
We’re working to be recognized as a world-class, game-changing strategic integrated marketing company. Not for fame or money – those are nice – but because we have big ideas for helping our clients grow their businesses. We want to redefine what it means to be a marketing partner, and we believe companies are ready to engage their customers and stakeholders in better ways.
Principle one: don’t have a marketing department...be a marketing organization. At all levels of the enterprise, employees and stakeholders can contribute to building and expanding an organizations’ brand and perceived value. Successful companies can and do incorporate marketing cultures into their organizations with great effect.
Why we’re doing it
Marketing has received short shrift over the past 25 years – probably longer than that. Beginning with the advent of cost accounting in the 1960s, mergers and acquisitions and working the stock market have become the leading corporate strategy for growth and general management.
According to research by Dr. Nirmalya Kumar in his book, Marketing as Strategy, more than 70% of the corporate world is led by executives trained as accountants, attorneys, and operators. When we bounce that against Peter Drucker’s supposition that marketing and innovation are the only two basic functions of business, we begin to see why so many companies A) struggle with growth strategies and B) fail to invigorate their organizations with the inspiration necessary to sustain innovation and vitality.
Here is Drucker’s quote in full: “Because the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer, the business enterprise has two – and only two – basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.”
Terrain is launching to take up Drucker’s belief as its battle cry. In my own experience, many of you have heard me say, as written above, “Don’t have a marketing department, be a marketing organization.” Making that transition and then executing on our clients’ strategy and goals is our reason for being – what Joey Reiman (Google him!) calls our corporate ethos.
Literature holds many metaphors that have great business application – for Terrain, the stories The Velveteen Rabbit and Watership Down have been particularly meaningful; the first in helping us understand the long and sometimes painful process of becoming a real company.