What's Marketing?
Can you imagine a business function other than marketing where there would be a debate about what it was?
A bunch of accountants at a convention. Would any of them have a hard time defining what accounting is? Would the description of what each of them does all day differ much from one to the next?
How about plant managers? HR directors? Sales Managers? No, marketers are alone in having so much discretion over the description of their work. And if you doubt it, ask any ten people with marketing in their titles what marketing is.
That's why I'm starting here.
The definition of marketing with the most credibility is the American Marketing Association’s (AMA).
"Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, partners and society at large.”
For me, that’s too abstract.
My short definition is: “marketing is syncing what a company does with what a group of people wants.”
Still be too abstract? Try this story-driven explanation.
*******************************************
Imagine a family farm that sells its produce at farmers’ markets. The workforce: Dad, Mom, four daughters and three cousins. Dad and the two eldest daughters do the growing and harvesting of fruits and vegetables. They get salable produce onto the trucks on market day. They do it well, but that’s all they do.
The cousins drive the produce-laden trucks to the farmers’ markets. There, they set up and stock the booths and break them down at the end of the selling day; they’re the distribution channel, along with the farmer’s market organization.
After the booth is set up, the two youngest daughters take over, selling face–to–face, collecting money and so on. These three are sales or the selling and customer service function, or whatever you want to call it.
At the market, the daughters adjust prices to reflect market conditions (what if there are a lot more booths with carrots that day? Or fewer shoppers?), timing, and other market-related conditions. They may, toward the end of the session, include a head of escarole with two bunches of carrots. They’re doing what we call promotion. It’s one of the elements of the Big Topic.
Finally, we get to marketing. Let me introduce you to Margie. she's the fourth daughter and in the beginning, it wasn't clear what she would do for the family. She went to markets but she wasn’t very good at selling; she was too introverted for that. She was fascinated by numbers and statisticsNumbers and statistics fascinated her. She started keeping track of the number of booth visitors per week and how much each one bought from them.
She was aiming, though she didn’t know it at first, to learn about seasonality and market share. After a couple of years, she could compare results year over year. Once she’d gotten that, she came up with an estimate for the effect of seasonality on sales.
She counted the visitors to the family’s three principal competitors’ booths along with their own visitor count. She created a crude measure of their own versus competitors’ market shares.
She noted which products sold together, like carrots and potatoes, or strawberries and rhubarb. She studied how their booth’s position (near an entrance, at the end of a row, etc.) affected sales.
And she talked with customers who bought at their booth, others who didn’t, and her competitors’ customers. She asked them all what they liked and didn't like about booths, how they picked produce, what they did with it at home and more. She couldn’t learn enough about customers.
After months of learning about customers’ habits and interests, Margie started recommending changes. For example, she found that total booth revenue went up 30% when they offered larger bundles of carrots for $2 each instead of small $1 bundles. Adding a 3-for-$5 offer on the sign over the carrots took business up another 20%.
The breakthrough was when they pre-bagged carrots for easier handling by customers. It improved the customer experience and as a bonus made the sales process easier for booth personnel – the daughters
Margie had strong credibility in the family by the time she started asking for product changes. They resisted at first, but dad and the girls grew some exotic, multicolor baby carrots. Even at $4 a bundle, they quickly became the number one seller.
For quite a while Margie's booth was the only multicolor baby carrot booth. She had picked up a tip that these would be hot from a chef buying at their booth. Margie could tell this chef knew her stuff by the embroidery on her jacket – "Executive Chef", and by her clogs. Margie was learning from category influencers.
So Margie guided promotion, focused what was going on in the booth, estimated production, and changed the product to fit the marketplace. But she was just getting going.
She hit her stride when she put out a sign-up sheet at the booth so she could create a mailing list of committed customers. She started a blog and regular emails to her loyal customers. Once she got a message down that people liked, she started issuing press releases and contacting local news outlets. Then she started doing advertising.
After all, with unique, exciting produce offerings you can get only at their booth, she had a lot to say.
***************************************
Margie isn’t what many people think marketers are like. She’s not a creative, ethereal, design-type nor is she charismatic or extroverted. Some marketers are both of those, most are not. The marketing role is more like scientist or scholar than it is artist, writer or salesperson.
***********************************
The definition of marketing I just gave you is way different than the academic ones that fill b-school class time. The definition I got in business school was a list, The Four P’s: product, price, promotion and physical distribution. That was followed by, “That’s what marketing is about,” and you’re done with the first year anyway. For me, list definitions aren’t useful.
There are lots more of them. Like the Four C’s: commodity, cost, communication, channel. They map to the P’s, but they’re supposed to be more consumer-focused.
Someone else came up with the Seven P’s – more P’s to reflect service businesses. I still don’t get why you’d try to turn something dynamic like marketing into a list of static things. My advice: learn them to pass the exam, but don’t use a list definition of marketing for day-to-day.
**************************
On a good day, I enjoy doing the work of marketing. The quiet reflection on pages of numbers and graphs, the "Aha!" moments, sweaty conference rooms late the night before a deadline, the victory dance (short) when things work the want they're supposed to.
But you have to recognize the ethical challenge of being a marketer even as you revel in the thrill of persuading thousands, even millions of people to do things.
When they do it right, effective marketers ignite hope, optimism and desire in people. These emotional drivers make economies work better for their participants. These people get satisfied by their transactions, what they buy and with their lives. Investors and managers get rich. And marketers have fun, make good money and are fulfilled by their careers.
And then there's when they do it wrong. By that I mean selling people stuff they don't need or want or that is bad for them or the people who made the products or the environment. The line between good and evil marketing is hard to see clearly in the moment. Sometimes, you realize years later that you were the bad guy.
You get to decide what marketing is for yourself. Everyone else has tried, and now that includes me. None of us has done it justice. So it's your turn.
