Sergey Pruss: What Strong Marketing Is Made Of

We all know the word “marketing” and understand its importance, yet there is still no single answer to the question: what is it? Without a shared concept, it is difficult to put marketing into practice—and what is not understood cannot be effective. For marketing to deliver results, we need to answer this simple but surprisingly difficult question.

Sergey Pruss, Serenity's CEO, offers his perspective. He explains what marketing means to him, the challenges of building it into a business and how to address them in practice.

— Hi! Let me start with a million-dollar question: what is marketing, in your view?

To me, marketing is strategic. In brief, it means creating and delivering competitive advantages across the product, brand, customer experience and company culture.

— Why, then, do people so often think marketing is just promotion?

Performance specialists may see marketing as a set of performance tools, PR specialists as communications, and social media specialists as promotion on social networks.

In the last century, Philip Kotler popularised the 4Ps—product, price, place and promotion—which put the product at the centre of a broad view of marketing. That model is somewhat dated today. If I had to name four key areas now, I would say product, brand, promotion and culture.

Good marketing leads to repeat purchases and recommendations. These depend on a strong product and brand, which in turn need a strong culture and team.

— If people usually see marketing as separate disciplines, can they really work together?

Yes, if we understand what keeps marketing from working as a whole: the lack of coordination between disciplines and a shared strategy to connect them.

This can happen within a company when, for example, sales, advertising and branding teams do not work closely together. It can also happen when a company hires several agencies but gives them no shared strategy: they do not operate as one team, their messages differ and they lack shared analytics.

The same disconnect can occur within full-service marketing agencies. Different departments may operate separately, each with its own economics and little coordination. Every department sees its own work as the most important.

— Why does this happen? Is coordination really so difficult?

It is difficult. One person needs to coordinate the work, keep everyone aligned with the strategy and allocate resources. That is a challenge because it requires a good understanding of every discipline.

Steve Jobs is a good example. He managed every part of marketing and understood design and audience emotions. He built a strong team culture, introduced innovation and demanded the highest quality in products and service. Unfortunately, there are very few people like that.

— What should a company do if it does not have a genius like that?

Build a strong team that can provide the same breadth of expertise.
The team needs to work closely together. Several discipline leads should coordinate continuously and build processes within their teams so everyone contributes to one shared strategy and its execution.

I had tried to bring all of Serenity's disciplines together before, but those attempts were not quite right. Still, I think we found a solution about a year ago.

— How did you solve it?

We have more than 12 marketing disciplines, each with its own lead and team. We grouped them into two broad areas led by product managers: Lisa for branding and Katya for performance. They share responsibility for strategy and execution, bringing integrated branding and performance teams together through the discipline leads.

The product managers work closely together. Katya and Lisa operate as one team every day, with a shared budget and KPIs. I believe it is essential to have strong people in marketing leadership who share values and work as one team.

Teamwork has always been important to our agency. We bring in strong leaders who share our values and know how to think “we,” not only “I.” I believe this culture helped bring very different disciplines—branding and performance—together.

— What is the most important marketing advice you would give business owners?

Understand that business is marketing. Finance, accounting, production and logistics all matter, but without people who want to buy your product, none of the rest can work. I do not think marketing should be delegated entirely—no one understands your business as well as you do. Build a strong marketing team and lead it.

Successful entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Oleg Tinkov and Fyodor Ovchinnikov have always focused on marketing and treated it as their responsibility. To do it well, develop a marketing mindset. I write about it on my Telegram channeland regularly share practical experience there.