Hi all, I wanted to get opinions from fellow marketers on an issue I have been dealing with in work recently.

I work in a not-for-profit arts organisation. The current big service/project that we’re pushing is performing very poorly in terms of sales. Of course, our finance manager and other departments are putting pressure on us in the marketing department to improve this, and they are borderline blaming us for this poor performance. (Of course, when a project performed well earlier this year, they said it was due to everything but marketing, but I digress.)

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying we’re definitely not at fault. But my issue is, how can we know for sure that it’s the fault of the marketing team?

Products/services may not sell well for a number of reasons, one example being the cost of living crisis – people potentially don’t have disposable income to spend on the kind of service we offer.

The next reason may be that the product is simply not appealing to people. Yes, it is our job as marketers to make the product appealing to people as much as we can. But we’re not wizards and we can’t mislead people just to increase sales.

My second issue is that we have limited budget. We are doing everything within our power to promote this big project, but at the end of the day, we only have so much to spend.

Have any of you had similar experiences? Or do you disagree with me entirely? I’d just like to hear people’s opinions and start a discussion!