Jägermeister Marketing Director: How a cup of tea in the sun almost destroyed the purchase funnel

Ah, glorious autumn! A final chance to enjoy a bit of sunshine. A last opportunity to have a cuppa al fresco, and to feel the rays of sun warming your skin before months on end of rain, wind, cold and general misery.

Or so I thought when I suggested to take a recent meeting to one of the nearby cafés. A brilliant idea, surely - plenty of oxygen to feed the brain, a freshly brewed beverage and perhaps even some biscuits. Brilliant... until the lady at the front of the terrace asked us the dreaded question: 

She wouldn't budge. And for me, it wasn't just the utter disbelief that set in. It was the whole value chain, the whole purchase funnel that collapsed right before my eyes. So many steps taken to get to the consumer coming in to spend money: open a café, put on a good menu, buy chairs and tables for the outside terrace, make sure you look open... and then when the consumer finally arrives, willing to spend, you turn them away.

I am still somewhat puzzled by it and there might well be a perfectly reasonable explanation, but I also felt that this experience can be seen as an example of what happens when you lose sight of the goal: the sale.

I have seen it more than once, and have certainly been guilty of it more than once, where marketers believe the job is done once the campaign is live or the product has been launched or the latest post has generated more likes than before. All of those are great successes and can be vital to making a brand successful. But the ultimate measure of success isn't likes, impressions or a five-star rating. It is hard cash. In the end, profit is what it's all about.

But isn't that the job of the sales team? Hear me out. As much as some rejoice in the big marketing-v-sales divide, we are all on the same side. We have to admit that, broadly speaking, businesses exist make money. When you make money, you can invest, employ people, pay suppliers etc. And when you take in more money than you spend, you make a profit.

Now, when you look at the org chart of most organisations and you take a, let's say, purple pen and circle all the departments that spend money and then take an orange pen and circle all the departments that bring in money, you'll see that, as much as some might hate to admit it, the only department with an orange circle is the sales department. Everyone else is purple. And the more Sales sell, the more money there is to pay for everything and everyone else. I know this is pretty basic stuff and I apologise that I'm teaching you to suck eggs here, but I think it is important to remind ourselves of this every once in a while.

What follows from that is that, in essence, everyone else has to make sure that the sale can happen so the orange circle can bring in the money: products get produced, they reach the point-of-purchase, they are accessible in store etc. And, very important, there is a constant flow of consumers who know about those products, want to buy them and actually are ready to part with their hard-earned cash.

And when somewhere in that process, there is a breakdown, there is no sale, no income, no money. That is what happened in the café. All the effort that had gone into getting to a sale, and then all it would have taken them to go from spending money to making money would have been to say "please sit down, what would you like?"

So does that mean a marketer's job is reduced to mundane activations focused on a short-term sales uplift? Far from it. There's still plenty of researching, strategy-setting, targeting, recruiting, and long-term brand building to do, alongside the short-term stuff. And this list isn't exhaustive. But the point is: at the end of it all, you have to look at the commercial impact and make sure that for the consumer to not just easy to know and like your brand - but also to buy your brand.

Something worth thinking about in the sun with a cuppa, perhaps?