The Peter Principle

Written by Colin Gillman | 03 February 2012

It’s not hard to be half decent at b2b marketing. After all, it’s a simple matter of promoting your company, products, services and even your people to other businesses in your sector who might have an interest in what you have to offer to make their own business better. A more simple way of looking at it is that they have the money and you want it, and how do you go about getting their money in a way that is both ethical and to the mutual benefit of both organisations?

You would be amazed at how many so called ‘marketeers’ I have seen on the manufacturing/supplier side of our industry that fail to grasp this simple process and instead treat every facet of marketing their company as if they were guarding rocket science. This type of incompetence is usually referred to as The Peter Principle.

The Peter Principle holds that in a hierarchy, members are promoted so long as they work competently. Eventually they are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent (their "level of incompetence"), and there they remain, being unable to earn further promotions. In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out their duties and work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence. Managing upward is the concept of a subordinate finding ways to subtly "manage" superiors in order to limit the damage that they end up doing.

I once worked in the marketing department of a global graphics giant that was run by a Peter Principal marketing manager who was in fact a failed channel sales manager that had been given the marketing managers job because they wanted to limit the amount of damage he might do in the sales division. It was a classic sideways promotion. The company was bloated and arrogant because it was the 1980’s and business was booming and money was flying in through open windows. They had the products that printers were clamouring for. Therefore who needed marketing when things were going this good? Then there was a recession in the 90s along with a technology shift – sound familiar? Suddenly everybody was looking at marketing to generate new business leads, and Peter, who thought it was the sales division’s function to generate its own blasted sales leads, wasn’t happy. So he started the business trend for ‘meetings’. This was a new marketing tactic as we had never had ‘meetings’ like this before.

The ‘meeting’ was a fantastic method to disguise the fact that Peter was failing to market the business properly. The best part of this strategy, as far as I could ever figure out, was that if Peter could spend his entire working day having internal meetings, his department would appear to be so busy we would never have any time to do any actual marketing. Therefore any downward dip in revenue budgets must lie entirely at the feet of ‘sales’.

Before I continue, let us first consider that the company where I worked was selling goods to printers, or what we call print service providers or PSPs today. Printers, by their very nature, are hairy bottomed belt and braces manufacturers. No offence, but I speak as a qualified printer having spent three years at the London College of Printing working for my City & Guilds ticket. I have found that having spent my younger days on the tools has always held me in good stead for knowing what it is that printers want and how they behave, and I continue to think and swear like a printer even to this day. Now in my time I have met a handful of very posh print business owners and production managers, but on the whole we’re all pretty much the same, and what’s more we’re not that hard to sell too either!

So in one of Peter’s internal meetings he was going round the table in search of ideas to attract new business and was running the flag up the flagpole to see who might salute it – he really did use such dreadful analogies – whereupon he turned to me and said “Colin. You’re my Tight End in a third down situation. Go wide.” Eh? I honestly didn’t have a clue what he was asking of me. I was new and this was early days in my marketing career, so I stared at him for what seemed like an age before I felt a wise old sage of a colleague kicking my foot, and talking out the side of his mouth he tightly whispered “Feed him any old pile of bullshit just to shut him up.” So I said we should undertake a series of radio advertisements.

I explained that radio could bring our advertising to life, give our company an identity, and reinforce our brand. I felt that if done properly, it would tightly focus our advertising campaigns and help us to better target printers. As I pointed out, in every printing company I have either worked or visited there was always a radio blasting out over the noise of presses. I then explained that the additional benefits of using radio meant we could communicate to potential customers at any time of day or night and we could even select certain times of the day in which to advertise more frequently. I closed by saying that radio advertising works by repetition – increased exposure to a message will reinforce it - and that radio is one of the most cost-effective means of creating frequent, focused communications to a massive audience.

I had looked at our budgets and had figured that the cost of a radio advert was far less than what we were spending at the time on paying an advertising agency to create ‘artistic’ print advertising with photographic models under lighting in studios on expensive sets shaking hands over desks with earnest expressions on their faces. My mistake, probably, was to conclude with the caveat that printers, on the whole, tend not to align themselves with such phoney looking corporate imagery.

You could have heard a pin drop before he launched into me. “Our customers don’t listen to the radio,” he raged. “They work incredibly long hours and certainly won’t have time for listening to radios!” He went on about how radio was not a credible medium for b2b marketing and shot down every one of my ideas in flames. Nobody had ever had the guts to pitch such a fanciful idea to Peter before. He wasn’t a printer and had probably never been on the shop floor of a printing company. Besides, Peter only ever listened to Radio Four and was judging our customers by his own personal standards. If it wasn’t good enough for him it couldn’t possibly be good enough for our customers.

That was over twenty years ago but there are still people like Peter in marketing departments up and down the country who are afraid to do something that they have never done before, and if you continue to do nothing, you will continue to get nothing in return. It’s all about having a “Who Dares Wins,’ Rodney” mindset. Those who have the chutzpah and are prepared to stand up and be counted and dare to do something different will eventually succeed.

This time next year Rodney, we’ll be millionaires.

Colin Gillman
colin@graphicdisplayworld.co.uk