Marketing is definitely no joke

By TJ MacDonald |

In a previous post I pointed to a scathing criticsm of marketing. [Is your marketing a joke?] If you are ‘in marketing’, I hope you didn’t take it too seriously and actually go ‘kill yourself’.

So, if you survived, what’s your perception of marketing? Chances are you are reading this without a doubt in your mind about what marketing is. But I’m betting that it varies with your background and experiences.

‘Marketing’ is perhaps the most loosely used word in business language. Everyone knows that profit is profit and a sale is a sale (unless your scepticism insists it’s not until the cheque is cleared.) But for some reason ‘marketing’ seems to mean what we want it to mean.

Popular usage tends to equate marketing with the promotion of products, often conjuring thoughts of advertising and branding. However, frequently used terms like Network Marketing, Direct Marketing and Internet Marketing embrace that more direct business activity: Selling! (I like the honesty of direct response copywriters who describe their craft as “salesmanship-in-print”.

As a test of popular usage forget dictionaries. Go ask Google to ‘define:Marketing’. You will easily find many entries that emphasise “selling”, “persuading customers to buy” or variants of these.

Not surprisingly, we now have hordes of fresh-faced kids selling cellphones during the day then later in social conversation importantly claim, “I’m in marketing!” ‘In marketing, maybe, but hardly the implied “I do marketing’! At least not in the professionals eyes.

In professional usage, marketing has a much broader responsibility than promotion and selling. Since the mid-20th century a professional objective has been to optimise the “marketing mix” – that finely balanced arrangement of Product, Price, Place and Promotion ( the 4P’s) that contribute to business success.

Changing market conditions and business models have triggered new thinking. The ‘essential’ elements of marketing have been modified and fine tuned as we rolled from an Industrial Age through the Information Age into the beginning of a totally new Age of Transformation.

One thing hasn’t changed though – expert recognition that there is a lot more to marketing than just the direct selling function. According to the new definition of marketing from the American Marketing Association:

Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.

Put simply, business is not just about selling. It is not just about promotion, and it is not just about marketing. It is all about doing the things – all the things – that are needed for people in your marketplace to learn to do great business with you. From learning to want to do business with you, to wanting to help others learn to do business with you. That activity is known as

MARKETPLACE LEARNING.

Whether you like it or not, the health of your business is inseparably linked to MARKETPLACE LEARNING and the role you take in it. Your strategic priority in all this is to lead what is learned. How you do it then determines your tactics.

There are many of those to be probed in later articles.

Let’s talk again. Until then…
Learn well, Lead well, and Thrive!

TJ MacDonald