I found yet another interesting article at Harvard Business Publishing, this one called, “In a Recession, Put Everyone in Marketing,” by Rosabeth Moss Kanter.

Her argument is that once you’ve cut everything you can, from budgets to people, everyone remaining should work in marketing.

“Motivated employees contribute to creative thinking that can help retain current customers and identify new ones.”

People throughout the ranks should be contacting customers. Executives should be personal ambassadors to important customers. New markets should be researched. All ideas are welcome, from all sources-with rewards attached for good ideas.

Kanter wanders off her point when she writes about investing in employee morale, but it’s good to see the importance of marketing elevated throughout an organization. And I completely agree that more people in a company should have customer contact.

What bothers me is the assumption that everyone in the company knows how to be a marketer. I mean, if I worked for a software company I wouldn’t want to be recruited to write code when it was time to launch a new version, or told to be the customer support rep handling the calls that come when a customer tries to use the software containing the code I wrote.