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?