Who owns client experience
when there’s no marketing lead.

The client Christmas function, the referrer dinner, the settlement gifts, the donor thank-you, the table at the industry awards, the sponsorship renewed every year without anyone quite remembering why — all of it sits with someone. Usually a practice manager, an executive assistant, a director of mission, or the one partner who cares about it most. None of them was handed the decision. They were handed the arrangements.

That distinction is the whole of it. Arrangements are a set of tasks with dates attached. Direction is deciding what the year is meant to do, which relationships it is for, and what gets dropped so the rest can be done properly. One of those can be delegated to whoever has a clear fortnight. The other can’t.

The work goes to whoever is closest, not whoever is highest

When there’s no marketing lead, client experience lands where the operational load already is. The person who books the venue starts choosing the guest list. The person choosing the guest list starts deciding which relationships matter. Nobody intended that and it happens in every organisation of this size.

It isn’t a competence problem. A good practice manager will run a flawless evening — the room is right, the catering arrives on time, the invoices reconcile. What they can’t do, because it was never theirs to do, is decide that this year the firm will spend most of its attention on the twelve referral relationships that have gone quiet, and that the all-staff function will be smaller as a result. That decision belongs to someone who carries the commercial consequence of it.

So the decision doesn’t get made. The year gets assembled instead, out of whatever was on last year’s calendar, and the arrangements are excellent.

A stretched marketing manager loses the thinking first

Plenty of organisations do have someone. One marketing manager, or a communications officer, often junior, often part-time, carrying the website, the tenders and grant applications, the award submissions, the social accounts, the newsletter and the events.

In that role the deadlines are all attached to the doing. The submission closes Friday. The invitations have to go out. The brochure is at the printer. The part of the job with no deadline is the part where someone sits down and decides what the next twelve months is for, and that part is what gets postponed every week for entirely reasonable reasons.

The result is a marketing function that is busy and reactive and never gets ahead of itself, judged on output because output is what’s visible. Add a second person and the output doubles. The thinking still doesn’t happen, because nobody’s week has ever been built around it.

What an undecided year looks like from outside

A calendar nobody decided has a particular shape, and it’s recognisable across sectors.

There’s one large annual event that takes three months of attention and happens because it has always happened. There are two or three smaller things done at short notice because a sponsorship deadline arrived or a partner asked. There’s a gifting list carried over from last year, with the same names and roughly the same budget. And there are long stretches — February to June in most firms — where the organisation’s best clients hear nothing at all unless they’re mid-matter.

Each piece is defensible. Together they’re not a plan, and no one is in a position to say so, because the only person with the full view is the one holding the arrangements and they weren’t asked for a view.

The question that reveals it

Ask an owner what their client experience is meant to achieve this year and the answers come back in categories rather than outcomes. Brand awareness. Client retention. Staying front of mind. Those are descriptions of a general direction, not decisions, and nothing can be planned against them.

The useful version is narrower and harder. Which relationships the year is actually for, by name. What is meant to be different about each of them by December. Which things on the current calendar are there out of habit and can go. Most organisations have never answered those in writing, which is why the same calendar reappears each year with the dates moved.

Where the argument doesn’t hold

A sole practitioner or a firm of four doesn’t need a decision layer. The owner is the decision layer, the relationships fit in their head, and formalising it would add process to something already working.

Nor does this apply to an organisation with a real marketing function and a genuine mandate — a head of marketing who reports to the chief executive, sets the direction and briefs the specialists. That organisation has what’s being described here. It needs delivery, not direction, and it should be sceptical of anyone suggesting otherwise.

The organisations this applies to are the ones in between. Forty to three hundred people. A base of relationships worth protecting, a reasonable annual spend across events, gifting and sponsorship, and no single person whose job is to decide where it goes. That is a large part of professional services and property, most family enterprises, and the better-funded end of the not-for-profit and care sectors — where the same pattern appears in different words, with donors, supporters, referring families and the diocese standing in for clients and referrers.

Direction doesn’t have to be employed to be held

The instinct, once the gap is visible, is to hire. Sometimes that’s right. Often the budget won’t carry a senior marketing appointment, and a junior one recreates the original problem with more output attached.

The other option is that direction is held from outside the organisation and reports to the owner or the board, while the arrangements stay where they are. The practice manager keeps running the evenings, and runs them better, because somebody has settled in advance what each one is for and who it’s for. The specialists stay specialists — the photographer, the printer, the venue, whoever the organisation already trusts — briefed against one direction instead of five separate conversations.

What changes isn’t the quality of any single occasion. It’s that the year holds together, somebody can account for it at the end, and the decision about what it should contain gets made by someone with the standing to make it.

An organisation can run an excellent event with nobody in charge of the year, and most do. Nothing goes wrong on the night. The cost turns up a year or two later in a relationship that went quiet, and by then it reads as bad luck rather than as something nobody was asked to decide.

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GD Events Group is a Sydney practice for the design of strategic experiences — corporate events, hosted environments and gifting, curated journeys and strategic experience programs. About the practice.