Like or loathe him, Telstra's new marketing chief, Mark Buckman, is something of a rare beast these days.
When was the last time you came across someone who carried the lofty title of chief marketing officer? (see story opposite)
Such a moniker calls to mind the days when being a marketer really meant something.
Marketing used to be about the four Ps: price, promotion, product and place. Commercial directors have taken pricing off them, placement has been largely ceded to the retailer and, if they are lucky, they get a say in the product; if not they are told to go away and sell it. Which leaves promotion.
Yes, the marketing department has been left to come up with the fun stuff, the pretty ads, the kooky social media campaign - the sort of things that others in the business don't take that seriously. Even customer service is rarely left to marketers to look after.
There are exceptions, notably Unilever, Holden, Coles and Woolworths.
''There's a belief in Australia that anyone can do marketing, that it can sort of be picked up by just about anyone,'' says the recruiter Anthony Hourigan, who hopes Buckman (who he placed at Telstra) will herald a comeback for marketing. ''They are wrong, of course, but that's what people think.''
The reasons behind the decline of the marketing department are many and varied and stretch back over a decade.
Firstly is the rise of the procurement operative, who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. If paper clips can be bought more efficiently, so too can advertising services, goes their twisted logic.
Secondly, there is the outsourcing to agencies and groups, which has expedited the transfer of intellectual property outside companies. The fact that the average tenure of a marketing director is as little as two years has not helped. Thirdly, they have neglected their responsibilities as the voice of the company. When as a younger reporter I was called upon to write about a company's marketing, invariably it was the marketing director who was brought to the phone. He or she was the public face of that brand, and if anyone was going to mount a defence or go on the front foot about that brand's activities, that's who it was.
Today that role has largely fallen to the corporate affairs department, whose sole purpose in life, it seems, is to reduce anything that emerges from the company into an indigestible gobbet of corporate non-speak.
Where are the Bob Millers of Toyota and the Peter Bushes of McDonald's? Anyone who reads the pages of the likes of Ad Age in the US can witness a thriving and lively discourse about marketing by marketers that sadly is non-existent here.
Mark Crowe, the chief executive of the Australian Marketing Institute, argues that marketing is due for a revival as Australian companies move out of an era of constant cost-cutting and into a cycle of revenue generation. One only has to look at the market share battle between the banks to see that more marketing than ever is taking place, even if much of it is pedestrian and bland.
''There's a great opportunity for marketers to reposition themselves within companies, but only if they can demonstrate that they have broader skills,'' says Crowe.
If marketers can't do a better job of selling their profession then, quite frankly, who can?
