“This is just marketing.”
How many times have you heard it? When did marketing become detached from the truth? When did manipulation, exaggeration, deception and dissimulation become its friends?
Maybe the destiny of a strong word is to be destroyed by its own power. Everybody wants to use it. Many do it without knowing its actual meaning. Others, not so well intentioned, borrow its power to convey meanings that don’t belong to it. And if people repeat the new usage of the word enough times, without much investigation, the word acquires the new connotations. Until the point when the word is carrying more meanings that it can bear, including opposing ones fighting against each other. The word end up meaningless.
But before we decide to bury the word, we can try try to prune it and to separate the weeds from its roots:
| # | “Marketing” (the weeds) | Marketing (the roots) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | “Marketing” is self serving. It looks primarily to benefit the marketer. | Marketing has a genuine focus on the customer. The benefit for the marketer is a consequence. |
| 2 | “Marketing” is an afterthought. You call it to work once the product or service is ready. | Marketing is intertwined with the product or service, from creation to launch, till the end of its life. |
| 3 | “Marketing” should be adopted even in smaller businesses. | Marketing is not optional. It is always there. Everybody does it, well or badly, aware of it or not. |
| 4 | The “Marketing” aim is to help you sell more products. | The Marketing aim is to deepen your knowledge about your customer so you can make your offers better. Selling is a consequence. |
| 5 | “Marketing” is the part of the organization that takes care of branding and communications. | Marketing is a lot more than that. It goes from customer knowledge, to product or service conception, to pricing, to promotion, to communication, to delivery. |
| 6 | “Marketing” is an ad, a brochure, a press release, a Facebook page… | Refer to # 5. |
| 7 | The product or service is ready. Now we count on “Marketing” to boost our sales. | if you want Marketing to boost your sales, make it part of your processes starting at research and conception of your product and services. |
| 8 | “Marketing” is the art of convincing your customer that your offer is the best. | Marketing doesn’t push. If the customers don’t agree, Marketing gets back to the drawing board to better understand their needs and to develop a truly better offer. |
| 9 | You must define what kind of “Marketing” is relevant to your business: digital, point-of-purchase, door-to-door… | People constantly mix up the whole with its pieces. Marketing is the whole concept. Digital communication, digital sales, channel strategy, advertising, branding strategy… are just the pieces. |
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