Marketing: It's Not You, It's Me

It was wintertime, and it was corona time—this means that for the Marketing class with Prof. Martin Fassnacht , I was attending virtually. The course itself was hybrid, so you could participate on-campus if you could. But braving the corona landmines in the subway and train ride to Düsseldorf to sit in a closed classroom wearing a mask for eight hours sounded unappealing.?

This may have been a bad decision on my part. Because this class had a big revelation for me.

Professor Fassnacht is a larger-than-life personality. He fills up the classroom with his presence and booming voice. It is very clear he is a?marketing?professor, and the class hits double: as a knowledge source and a constant advertisement for marketing itself as a discipline.?

The core message is you need marketing at the heart of your firm. It should never be a separate, siloed department—an afterthought, if you will—no, it must be at the center of your business. When we talk about customer-oriented companies (like Apple, Amazon, and Google maybe a decade ago), we are actually talking about?market-oriented companies. They build their products and services thinking of their market first, in contrast with the?old?paradigm of building your product and then trying to sell to customers. This is what makes them successful.

Message received! If you want to win, think about your customers. Yes, yes, perfect. Thank you. I am now a marketing expert.

What do you mean there are three more days of class?

Here is the big revelation: I?suck?at marketing.

I like exact sciences. I think I am decently good at them, and they come naturally to me. I have had consistent and predictable output to my efforts drilled into me.

There is not a lot of consistency and predictability in marketing. It is as inexact as a discipline as they come. For every insight and example, you could picture me as Pablo Escobar from Narcos sitting, thinking a single word: “…why?”?

Let me give you an example. German company?Rimowa?sells premium quality luggage, with a single suitcase selling for over a thousand euros. They have focused and thrived on this market niche. Imagine, however, they opt to expand their product line to include cheaper products and serve another customer segment.

This would clash with their branding as a luxury manufacturer. But they could profit from expanding to this market. Is that a good idea??

…

Well, is it? Hello? Could you give me a hand here?

There’s no formula here. I can’t just crunch some numbers, get an NPV value and go, “pshh, of course, that is a good idea for Rimowa.?Of course.” The reality is it could be very profitable. It could also irreparably damage their brand. This is a tough strategic decision, and there is no correct answer.

Another example: management thinkers W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne introduced the?Blue Ocean strategy, which tells us companies can create untapped and uncontested markets by differentiating themselves from the competition. A great example is Nintendo, who did it successfully with its Wii and Switch consoles when competing against Sony and Microsoft.

Excellent! When do we go for a blue ocean strategy? What guarantees success here? Nintendo had a massive hit with the Wii, and an absolute stinker with the Wii U just a few years later. Should Nintendo have abandoned this blue ocean strategy? How do you make this call?

…yet again, there is no right answer. Cue my problem here.?

There is method to the madness, and there are marketing wizards that get consistent results. But it is much more artform than science, and I struggle to define the proper strategy.

I finished the class feeling slightly uneasy, like a fish trying to swim upstream. The following weekend, I asked a classmate what he thought of the class, and to my surprise, he enthusiastically said, “Oh man, it was great. That was the best class in the program so far.”

So… it might be just me, fam.

Onward… I guess?

Key Takeaways:

• Good marketing lies at the heart of successful companies. Building strategies based on what your market says trumps looking at your belly button.
• I do not excel at it. If I ever decide to do any entrepreneurial venture, I need to find a marketing coach. Or cofounder. Or outsource it. In fact, forget the thing, I will probably screw it up. Try not to lose hope.