Does mar­ket­ing offer any insights into busi­ness prob­lems — espe­cially those of the news busi­ness? Most old school journ­al­ists would put mar­keters in with snake oil sales­men, but mar­keters can be savvy ana­lysts. Ignore them at your peril.

Here’s mar­ket­ing ace — and my old Dean from Lon­don Busi­ness School — John Quelch ana­lys­ing what went wrong for Gen­eral Motors:

Here are my top eight reas­ons why GM has failed as a marketer:

1. Focus on products, not cus­tom­ers. For years, Detroit wrongly viewed product types as mar­ket seg­ments. Cars were clas­si­fied as sub­com­pacts, com­pacts, inter­me­di­ates etc. But no con­sumer ever left home pas­sion­ate to buy an “inter­me­di­ate car.” Seg­ments are groups of cus­tom­ers, not products … There must be pock­ets of con­sumer insight at GM but they do not read­ily trans­late into market-shaping product initiatives.

2. Too many products, too many brands…

3. Too many dealers…

4. Los­ing mar­ket con­trol. You know you are the mar­ket leader when the other play­ers in the value chain — pro­du­cers, deal­ers, con­sumers — all look to your product line as the bell­wether along­side which they organ­ize theirs. To com­mand respect, you have to be selling the most pop­u­lar mod­els in the middle of the mar­ket, the ones that con­sumers strive to trade up to, the ones that con­sumers aspire to move beyond.

5. Big­ger is bet­ter…the “pet­rol­heads” who run Detroit are all big, tall men. They would rather go down in Detroit his­tory as the guys who brought you the Escal­ade, not the Prius … Over half the cars bought in the USA are pur­chased by women; would you know that from the lineup of senior exec­ut­ives at GM?

6. No global brand…

7. Not inven­ted here…For dec­ades, Detroit has spurned US launches of high qual­ity vehicles con­ceived and made in its own European factories.

8. Fin­ance focus…The cost focus has crowded out needed emphasis on con­sumer insight and marketing.

Wouldn’t some of that would go for our business?