It is perhaps the biggest obstacle to marketing and has set marketing back decades. It can delay implementation of effective consumer marketing programs for week or months. What am I talking about? Power Point.
If you’re in marketing there is a 100% chance that you have had to develop a Power Point presentation and then get it approved, with endless revisions, by your manager. This whole process has slowed marketing to a crawl and prevents a lot of consumer marketing organizations from implementing effective marketing programs with speed.
If I had a dollar for every Power Point deck I have written, had a word smithed, and had to rewrite I would be quite well off right now. I have seen come brands effectively come to a stop quite so called “stake holders” all weigh in on strategies you’re planning to implement. Some call it analysis paralysis, but it actually is a form of self destruction that can turn marketers into dinosaurs.
What has contributed to this bottleneck is something called the matrix organization, along with managers who are unwilling to take risks without getting the buy-in of the people who work in the mail room.
Consumer marketing, in case you haven’t noticed, is changing at warp speed. Marketing tactics that are effective today are going to be moot next month and brands can ill afford to have weeks of meetings to determine what to do next.
How can you avoid this pitfall? Become a change agent. Don’t copy the whole company for changes to your marketing that could be implemented relatively quickly without months of Power Points. Sure, it involves risk, but those brands that take those risks are going to have a competitive advantage over slow moving laggards.
The issues you describe in colour and detail are very real, but have nothing to do with Powerpoint. They are caused by failing leadership and mediocre, risk averse professionals that do not want to take responsibility.