What is marketing?
Mark Amtower
Preeminent GovCon Marketing and LinkedIn Strategy Advisor offering the BEST in-depth LinkedIn training for the Federal market. A GovCon Influencer, Top Rated Speaker, Award-winning consultant, and Best-selling author.
Recently I posted Carl Dickson’s thought provoking article “Marketing vs Business Development” and it got a decent amount of traffic and provoked some interesting comments. I posted the link with this simple comment: “An article from?Carl Dickson- well worth your time!” The article pointed out how the market often confused the roles of marketing vs BD, and he weighed in with his views.
The article made me think more about why I’ve been proselytizing for marketing for nearly 40 years and whether or not I have clearly stated what I was proselytizing for…
So I decided to do a little research via Google, starting with the definition of marketing. There was much to choose from.
I Googled “best” marketing books of all time. I am happy to report that 70% plus of the books named on all the lists I looked at are in my library. A glaring omission by my calculations was that none of the lists included the Silicon Valley legend Regis McKenna, the man who taught Steve Jobs the value of story-telling early in his career. Two of his books, Real Time and Relationship Marketing, should be in every GovCon marketer’s library.
On nearly every list was the classic Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, by Jack Trout and Al Ries, the first marketing book I ever read. Remember my degrees are in American Literature, not marketing or business.
Other glaring omissions were Theodore Levitt’s Marketing Myopia and Philip Kotler’s Kotler on Marketing. These two are giants in in our field, the Peter Drucker’s of marketing.
But I digress. Yeah, I know, what a shock...I was searching for the best definition of marketing. I found a few but decided to come up with my own:
To orchestrate, to the best of your abilities and within your budget constraints, the activities which bring forth the positive attributes of your product or service to a targeted market. To identify and influence those within your market niche with data to help them to conclude your product or service is superior. To identify potential partners and develop synergies with them.
You need equal parts strategy, tactics, imagination, knowledge of your niche, including the understanding of the information grazing and buying habits of those you wish to influence.
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And you need vision.
Do not confuse advertising and PR with marketing. I view these as tactics of marketing. Inbound marketing altered the “Push” culture to the “Pull” culture and emphasized content. But again, both push & pull are tactics. Content marketing is critical but it is a tactic, as are ABM, SEO, infographics and other visual stimuli, like video marketing.
Marketing is the umbrella term.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the democratization of information sharing due to web 2.0 tools made publication “impressions” from advertising nearly a moot point. Now anyone could publish (online), and work to develop an audience. But again, a tactic. Web 2.0 simply offers new venues.
I go back to McKenna’s essay “Marketing is Everything” published in February, 1991 in Harvard Business Review and re-published as Chapter One in Real Time. ?Every touch point a company or company employee makes is marketing, whether it is someone drinking a little too much at a reception or an executive opening a door for someone. My article “The Simple Act of Being on LinkedIn is Marketing” was an attempt to show how everything you do as a business professional can directly or indirectly impact the perception of you and your company, and is, by default, a marketing activity.
I write this in the hopes of creating a discussion, not presenting the perfect definition of marketing.
So please share your thoughts here.
#GovCon #Marketing #Governmentcontracting
I Run the Most Important B2B Sales Leadership Organization in the World ? Host, Sales Game Changers Podcast ? “Women in Sales” Ally ? Author of “Insights for Sales Game Changers" ?? Lyme Disease Expert and Advocate ??
2 年Good job, Mark Amtower. I agree that almost everything is "marketing." And there are things that are specifically "MarkeTING," activities which, at the end of the day, are all designed to help drive revenue attainment.
Retired
2 年Mark Amtower thanks for sharing your thoughts on marketing after reading?Carl Dickson's post "Marketing vs. Business Development." I have learned a lot from both of you over the years. The content from McKenna is priceless.
Chief Value Officer
2 年Recently I have moved to a software company vs services and I have been taught that there's a difference between the marketing tactics. It appears product marketing calls for demand generation vs services is more about branding and messaging. There is a difference between the two and the tactics and even vision is different. And with that, the role of BD changes as well. I'm interested to hear folks thoughts about that topic.
Preeminent GovCon Marketing and LinkedIn Strategy Advisor offering the BEST in-depth LinkedIn training for the Federal market. A GovCon Influencer, Top Rated Speaker, Award-winning consultant, and Best-selling author.
2 年Expecting people to read a 31 year old lengthy essay on marketing may be a bit much. So here are the last 3 paragraphs from McKenna's masterpiece (my words, not his): The workstation will allow marketers to integrate data on historic sales and cost figures, competitive trends, and consumer patterns. At the same time, marketers will be able to create and test advertisements and promotions, evaluate media options, and analyze viewer and readership data. And finally, marketers will be able to obtain instant feedback on concepts and plans and to move marketing plans rapidly into production. The marriage of technology and marketing should bring with it a renaissance of marketing R&D—a new capability to explore new ideas, to test them against the reactions of real customers in real time, and to advance to experience-based leaps of faith. It should be the vehicle for bringing the customer inside the company and for putting marketing in the center of the company. In the 1990s, the critical dimensions of the company—including all of the attributes that together define how the company does business—are ultimately the functions of marketing. That is why marketing is everyone’s job, why marketing is everything and everything is marketing.
Accelerating Global Partnerships and Go To Market
2 年Mark, agree at a high level with your definition of Marketing, however, it depends on where your prospect is in the customer journey and the tactics used. Is your target prospect top of funnel and not even aware of your products and services? Here an awareness campaign through PR, advertising, social with thought leadership to create visibility to get you noticed to even be considered. If your prospect is middle of funnel and into the decision process, including demonstrations/product comparisons, the compelling data points from your definition (along with webinars/white papers/briefs) will be important. At the bottom of funnel and final decision making should rely on references, proof of performance, pricing, estimated delivery dates, etc., some of which marketing can support. I would suggest BD as a top of funnel Sales activity with engagement with a new prospect that shows interest face to face or virtually 1:1 meeting. This new prospect could come in as a lead from a marketing activity or the BD person might reach out through her/his network. However would agree that Marketing and BD should be aligned and work hand-in-hand to target prospects and build compelling messages, content and activities to drive engagement, .