When you define marketing you directly link it to product and sales, which is fair enough. Some marketers like to define it more widely than that – indeed if you look carefully at what some marketers maintain, they want to do your job without the responsibility. But let’s stick with what you think of as marketing. You decide the best directions you can take based on consumer research, competitor analysis, market demand and the best story for your product and brand to reach a market.

But your relationships and reputation depend on more than just product. You, your management team and your people are integral to the personality and operations of the company. When your product gets into trouble, which can happen through tampering, mistakes in design or just aggressive competition, you need something more to fall back on other than the strength of your product.

It’s in times of crisis that you can truly gauge the strength of your relationships and your reputation. Do your key stakeholders trust you and your team enough to give you time to recover, or are all of your eggs in your product basket?

When Apple was going through its poor patch a few years ago, many thought that the writing was on the wall – the end of Apple and probable takeover or collapse. But Apple’s key stakeholders trusted in the leadership of Apple – trusted their innovation and professionalism to find a way through even though the product had become stale and unwelcome.

This gave Apple the time and support needed to create new product and new marketing, and to now be a dominant force in their markets.

All car companies make mistakes and have difficulties but Toyota are now suffering badly. The initial concerns about the quality of their product have become overwhelmed by concerns about the quality of their management, their failure to respond. Toyota product has had an extraordinary reputation for quality for decades (yes, I am a Toyota driver) which should have safely guided them through this crisis, but they are now in deeper trouble because of things external to the product, such as leadership, management and direction.

Putting all of your communications into the marketing category is running the risk of focusing on product to the detriment of relationships and reputation external to the product. A major reason for this is that the measurements for marketing are mainly based on product and sales measurements.

Like internal, external, CSR and media communications, marketing communications is still an important element, just not the total answer.

This blog was first posted on Geoff's Gobbledegook, Geoff's personal blog site provided through the International Association of Business Communicators Xchange blog program