For some Australian businesses, a hard look at how marketing is managed has turned up ways to cut admin and get more from resources for which they have already paid.
THE PRODUCTIVITY DEBATE in Australia keeps returning to the same handful of topics: wages, tax, infrastructure and, more and more often, artificial intelligence. Those are big questions and they deserve the attention.
Inside plenty of businesses, though, something far less dramatic is going on. It rarely gets written about.
A number of companies have begun asking awkward questions about their own marketing teams. How many software subscriptions are we paying for? Why do we have four agencies? And why does a simple flyer need sign-off from three people? Where those questions have been answered honestly, the payoff has tended to reach further than the marketing budget.
How marketing got so complicated
Few marketing departments are deliberately built to be messy. They drift that way, one sensible-looking decision after another.
Someone signs up for a platform because the monthly reports are a headache. A second agency is brought in for a campaign the first one couldn’t take on. A regional office gets sick of waiting for the head office and finds a printer down the road. Ten years later, the business is running a marketing function that costs more than anyone has added up and nobody has the full picture of it.
The Productivity Commission has examined Australia’s productivity performance in detail, largely from a national policy perspective. Inside individual businesses, the obstacles to productivity are often much more ordinary, such as overlapping subscriptions or long email threads about which version of a file is current.
Fixing the structure, not just the symptoms
It is possible to treat all of this as a structural problem and not merely a spring clean.
In practice, that involves stepping back from individual tools and suppliers and considering how the marketing function operates as a whole. A review may identify duplicated responsibilities, approval processes that slow work down, or technology that no longer meets the business’s needs. Specialist marketing transformation services can help businesses review their marketing structure, agency relationships and allocation of responsibilities. The aim is to make better-informed decisions about marketing resources, priorities and expenditure, rather than simply cutting costs.
The output is usually a plan of some kind. It might reset priorities, swap tools for ones the team will actually use, spell out what each agency is there to do, and tie marketing spend more closely to results the business cares about.
It is unglamorous work. That tends to be why it sticks.
Where the gains become visible
Print is a good example, partly because it so rarely makes it into a strategy deck.
For a business spread across several states, whether through offices, stores or franchisees, printed material can be surprisingly difficult to manage. Brochures may come from one supplier, signage from another and business cards from a local provider. Prices can vary and branding may not always be consistent across locations. For businesses operating across multiple sites, corporate printing services managed through a centralised account can help simplify ordering, maintain brand consistency and improve visibility over purchasing. The benefit lies in having a more coordinated process and a clearer view of what each location orders.
Approved templates make it harder for an old design to slip back into circulation. Consolidated invoices mean the finance team is reviewing one bill, not forty. And if suppliers are close to the sites they serve, local production may cut freight costs or delivery times, although that depends on how the network is set up.
None of this matters much to a single office. Multiply it across a national footprint and it adds up.
A better kind of efficiency
Talk of efficiency can slide quickly into talk of redundancies. That is not the only way it plays out.
Done properly, simplification frees people from admin and gives them more time for work that needs a person’s judgement. The marketing coordinator who used to spend the last days of each month matching print invoices can do something more useful. The brand manager stops chasing outdated logos from Perth to Townsville. And the leadership team may finally have a straight answer to what marketing costs and what it returns.
Most staff would happily take that version of productivity.
Small fixes, lasting change
Nobody should pretend that tidier marketing departments will solve Australia’s productivity problem on their own.
Still, the gains described here do not depend on sweeping reform or a large technology budget. In many cases they are already sitting inside a business’s existing systems, waiting for someone with the time and the mandate to simplify them.
Holding on to those gains takes ongoing effort, including regular reviews of systems, suppliers and internal processes.
