What MarketING stands for?

Have you ever thought about what the word "Marketing" means?

I have seen and heard so many definitions and explanations of different people and books, that I started to wonder is there actual meaning of it?

So I have come up with this idea that everything and especially marketing needs an understanding from each individual point of view.

Here is mine:

The word MarketING is built with 4 elements.

MARKET

As every one of us knows it's that one imaginary place where people exchange goods for value. In the centuries it has developed from exchanging goods for goods, to physical places for exchanging goods, to exchanging goods for precious metals, to exchanging goods for currency, after that distance exchanging came in, and we all know what happened in 2020.

So the Market always existed - it just changes it's shape and form every now and then. Now, the market can't live a life by itself - it needs people and their relationships to exist. Here comes the ING part of MarketING.

Intensity

When I was in school I really liked Physics and today I find it has so much in common with people's relationships and psychology. One really important thing in market correlation between people is the capacity, the speed and the spread efficiency of your word. Imagine you are a seller in a tiny fish market with a shed and you have 50 more competition fish sellers. What are you going to do?

Most of you will say - you have to be different. Great! But what point of that if nobody knows you are different?

You have to spread the word!

The intensity of the word about you is core of how your customers are going to be attracted.

Actually writing this, I decided to check up on some definitions in Google for the word "intensity". Here is what I found:

1. the magnitude of a quantity (such as force or energy) per unit (as of area, charge, mass, or time)
2. the quality of being felt strongly or having a very strong effect
3. the strength of something that can be measured such as light, sound, etc.

You see, the word about you needs both depth and width to be efficient. And yes - it should be measured for how it is efficient.

Negotiation

As Christopher Voss says in his book Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It - "Everything is a negotiation!".

Let's think about that.

If the everyday communication with our friends and family, talking with a customer about our product, talking with a seller for their product, talking to our colleagues are acts of negotiation and a (more often spoken) contract - why not the online advertisement, PDF download or watching a video should not be?

Of course they are! They are just on a different channel and with a bit different rules. Yes, every negotiation needs rules!

Let's say for example you want to gather potential customers information and you say you are going to give them an valuable content in exchange of that. Now, if you succeed to give keep your promise - the negotiation and the contract are successful and the customer would be happy to move further in other negotiation steps with you - for example watch a webinar, book a demo, try a test drive, contact a sales person or else.

But if you don't keep your promise and you gathered customers data for a crappy and half-baked content - you may think you have succeeded the negotiation - but this is only for the short term and that person will rethink if he/she would want to step in another negotiation with you.

You see, those are the rules - everything needs to be considered as a balanced natural conversation between two normal people who can step out of every situation as a win-win.

Give value

Here, probably, some of you are going to say you are pissed of people telling you to give value and what that even means and you already gave so much value for the past two years and the results are not that good.

Then - give MORE value!

The customer loves to see proactive people on the other side whose only goal is for him/her to feel confident and satisfied of FIRST having contact with them and SECOND using their product - this ALWAYS comes second.

Here is where the value giving is created - to have the absolute, outrageous intention to create positive outcome for the person you are selling to. No matter if you sell Yogurt or a Production Machine.

I don't care how the person on the other side thinks about the world, what are their flaws, how they have treated you that one time, how the customers are really hard to be approached, or any other excuse you can think of - Keep searching on different ways to give them value over and over and over again and most of them are going to become the loyal customers you seek.

This is one of the conversations Marketing and I have talked about :)

I would love to hear what you think about marketing approach to customers and what is your opinion about it's definitions and variations.