IS advertising merely "froth"? Yes, if you believe Dominic Cadbury, newly chosen president of the Chartered Institute of Marketing. In a speech last week, he castigated marketing directors for concentrating too much on the "froth of advertising, corporate identity and design" and not enough on the "fundamentals of IT, distribution, human resources and customer service". Tough talk.
Nor did he stop there. "Many brands don't even need advertising, let alone an agency." Heresy indeed. But then we might expect Cadbury, whose day job is chairman of Cadbury Schweppes, to know what he is talking about. After all, the Cadbury company spends something like £20m on the frothy business of advertising its chocolates and that's before you even count corporate identity and design.
So isn't Cadbury being a mite churlish? Here is a man whose chocolate conglomerate has a history of great advertising. Who doesn't know Cadbury's blue-purple corporate identity, the colour with which it links its brands such as Crunchie, Wispa and Dairy Milk? And come on, who doesn't remember slogans such as "Award yourself the CDM" and "Everyone's a fruit and nut case".
Thanks to its consistent spend on advertising and design, Cadbury's is, to many people, chocolate. However, there is much in the company's central thesis, which is that the marketing department's fixation with advertising is behind its failure to be taken more seriously in the boardroom. As a result, boards are suspicious when marketing directors claim that, if only they had a bigger budget, they could increase sales volume, market share and earnings.
Ultimately, Cadbury believes that suspicion feeds through to the ultimate paymasters, a company's institutional investors. "We have to be accountable and identify the effectiveness of marketing," Cadbury said. True enough - and one might guess that, given his background, Cadbury is speaking from the heart.
But Cadbury might well ask where his company would be today if it hadn't such a powerful advertising heritage. Or he could ask the directors of BT, who reckon that the "it's good to talk" campaign has generated a return of £6 for every £1 spent on advertising.
Yet it is also true that good advertising is pointless without the support systems to deliver the promise. Here, Cadbury should ask the likes of BA or Tesco how their advertising is part of an outward-looking, marketing-based culture.
At the end of the day, however, it is easy to see why marketing departments prefer the "froth" to the "fundamentals". First, advertising is a lot more fun than IT and human resources. Second, buying great advertising makes marketing directors famous - not something that can be said of human resources.
