Note the Sourcing Innovation Editorial Disclaimers and note this is a very opinionated rant!  Your mileage will vary!  (And not about any firm in particular, as a few non-isolated incidents opened up a whole new line of questioning.)

In response to a post by eCornell (which is/was here), THE REVELATOR wrote this comment (which is/was here) which is repeated here in its entirety in case it gets deleted, since anytime we tried to have a serious conversation around sales, marketing, public relations, and/or Gen-AI with Big X firms and/or (mid-sized) consultancies and analyst firms, they have quickly deleted our comments, and sometimes their entire posts rather than enter into a real conversation on the subject (and now we have developed an implicit distrust any corporate account and keep copies of everything):

NOTE: The following post was inspired by a comment by Paul Rogers

Despite feeling like someone walking the hallowed halls of Cornell University wearing a “Yeah, Harvard University” t-shirt, sometimes you have to say things that need to be said – which is the purpose of sharing this article.

Ask ChatGPT the following two questions:

🤔 What is the role of the Public Relations professional?
🤔 What is the role of the Marketing professional?

Do you see any mention of end client or customer success as a priority? Whose best interests are PR and marketing professionals focused on? What does the answer to these questions tell you?

Corporate communication has always been about putting a positive spin on business and the brand. It reminds me of the 1986 Richard Gere movie Power – if not a great movie, it is certainly interesting and engaging. Denzel Washington’s role as public relations expert Arnold Billings is worth the price of admission alone.

Unfortunately, beyond the company they represent, are PR and marketing people doing more harm than good?

Thoughts?

To which the doctor responded (which is/was here)

Well, SI, which has repeatedly told companies in our space to fire their PR firms going back to 2008: Blogger Relations, firmly believes that PR firms are doing more harm than good because

1. you are NOT selling enterprise software to consumers and
2. it’s not “image”, it’s “solution”!

As for marketing, corporate marketing can be good if it exists to educate and explain, but when was the last time that happened on a regular basis in our space? Over a decade ago … now it’s all AI-this, orchestrate-that, and whatever the bullcr@p of the day is. It’s all buzz, no honey. All show, no substance. All confusion, no clarity. (It’s bad enough that Trump has brought back the Land of Confusion with his populist politics that have taken by storm the first world over, we don’t need it in our workplace!)

So, right now, I’d say at least 6/7, if not 9/10, marketers are doing more harm than good and should be fired with their PR brethren.

There are over 666 companies in our space, and way too many pandering any type of solution you can think of. While we need at least 3-5 in each industry group – market size – geo region – module focus you can think of for competition, we don’t need 30+. Most are not going to survive, especially when most of these don’t have solid solutions built from years of experience that solve real customer problems (as opposed to just offering some shiny new tech that looks good but doesn’t solve the majority of pain points in real organizations).

This means that companies need to focus less on marketing and selling and more on:

• market research, especially listening to what the real pain points are of the customers they want to sell to (and they need to focus in on a customer group here, you can’t be everything to everyone in our space and any company that thinks it can is the first company you should walk away from)
• solution (not product) development — not shiny new tech, tried-and-true tech that works
• market education, explaining what they do, how they do it, and why it solves real pain points after building a solution that solves the pain points they identified in their research

Which means, especially if money is tight, they should forget the marketers and instead focus on hiring researchers and educators. People are getting tired of the 80%+ tech project failure rates. They’d welcome some real insight and real focus on real solutions. If only the market would wake up and realize this!