It’s a truism that marketing departments have to justify their very existence, daily having to prove that their programs are revenue generators not cost centers, and beyond this, that they succeed in contributing positively to shareholder value. Despite the battery of measurement tools marketers have at their fingertips, corporate suspicion that Marketing overstates its effectiveness never goes away, leaving CMOs in the unenviable position of having to constantly defend their budgets and head counts.

This kind of pressure has the unintended effect of turning CMOs and their marketing departments into short-term thinkers. They are forced to react and fall back on hasty “common-sense solutions” to complicated questions, which they’d otherwise approach very differently, given the runway.

Common sense decision #1: “Today, we communicate across a variety of media. Let’s use ‘best in class’ agencies for each.”

This leads to is a proliferation of agencies whose messages need to be coordinated. And guess who this task falls to? The overworked Marketing Department. Additionally, when the number of agencies increases, the commitment of any individual agency to thinking strategically about a client’s problems decreases proportionally.

Overall result: the “best in class” approach leads to a decline in the quality of the client-agency relationship.

Common sense decision #2: “All marketing fees for our agency partners should decline regularly on an annual basis. We should expect agencies to become more productive on an hourly basis.”

Increased productivity plays a huge role in the economy, but it’s not a measure that can be paralleled exactly in the world of marketing. Nonetheless, it has become an expectation, and it often leads to an annual decline in agency fees or retainers.

Agencies, in response, downsize to match fee cuts, since they have to generate margins for holding company owners. That’s not a recipe for long-term strategic thinking or high quality work.

Overall result: advertisers get fewer and more junior agency people working on more complicated scopes of work. This leads to declines in creative quality and the associated failure of brands to grow appropriately.

If advertisers were to abandon “common sense” for the moment, and reflect instead on the question “what kind of relationships do we really need?” they would be better off not to listen to what they hear at ANA meetings. These focus mainly on cost-reduction strategies. Instead they should do some serious thinking about how to best structure customer-supplier relationships.

A good starting point would be to read the history of the automotive industry, as outlined in the book The Machine that Changed the World. This book contains the recipe for a changed way of working with suppliers that kept the U.S. automotive industry from falling victim to its more cost-effective Japanese auto competitors.

What were the major differences? “Bad” supplier management was characterized by lining up a large number of suppliers and conducting bidding contests. Suppliers were kept at arm’s length; the customer determined what the supplier was able to bid on.

Effective supplier management involved cutting down on the total number of suppliers, creating transparency, engaging suppliers in joint problem-solving, delegating greater responsibility, creating supplier accountability for improved brand performance, and sharing the benefits from initiatives that cut costs and added value. Toyota defined this as “The Toyota Way” for its manufacturing suppliers. Interestingly, their practice was extended to its media and advertising suppliers, as well.

Many advertisers practice the equivalent of The Toyota Way in their manufacturing and distribution operations. But ironically, they have their marketing teams moving in exactly the opposite direction in managing agency relationships. While what they practice appears to be “common sense,” what it amounts to is a huge divestment—the opposite of what to do when you want to create sustainable, long-term brand growth.