The Real Goal of Marketing

I'm sad.

I just read Chris Sell's post called "The Real Goals of Marketing?" After spending lots of time on Chris's weblog, I can tell you I get the impression he knows a lot about marketing. I love that Chris has enough passion for our customers that he thought about a job in marketing.

When he asked a long-time friend about marketing, here's what he was told (and here's why I'm sad...):

""Marketing is not about giving the customer what he wants, or even finding out what the customer wants and trying to get engineering to create it. It's about trying to sell the customer what you already have -- whether that's product, talent, or pre-conceived notions. If the needs of a customer occasionally overlap with an actual product, that's merely random coincidence.

"Marketing people are customer-focused in the sense of always thinking about why customers aren't buying enough stuff, and how to get them to buy more. You're customer-focused in the sense of caring about what customers need, and helping them accomplish it, even if that doesn't result in selling anything.

"But don't take it so hard. It's not as if I said you were too honest to be a banker, or too smart to be a teacher. (God, what if girls thought you were too handsome to be sexy?)"

WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG.

Problem is, lots of folks in the profession agree with the statements above. Too many still subscribe to the old "broadcast" model of marketing (throw out a message or product to enough people and a lot of it will stick).

But in focusing on understanding and meeting customer needs, marketing becomes a synergistic, simple proposition, a win-win partnership where you're exchanging value for value. A "marketplace" in the purest sense. I've seen far too much success when I was sincerely listening and meeting customer needs to ignore that doing it that way is the easiest way to make money, to sell product, to get visitors to websites, to drive demand.

Chris just nails it:

"My hope is that it's about taking a solution and letting folks that have the matching problem know so that you can trade your solution for their money and both consider yourselves lucky. Is this a naive view?"

No way is that naive. It's insightful and wise.

And for those of you among my marketing peers, please drop Chris a note to let him know how right he is. Folks like him cannot afford to listen to the wrong kinds of influences... :)

Comments

[John Moore]

John: Great blogging. I also keep running into the delusions among marketing people about "customer focus". It seems to me that some of the most exciting developments in marketing are coming from people who aren't actually in marketing - but who do get the idea of community. Some of my friends say the world's best brand is Alcoholics Anonymous, because they really get how to create support for people, and get way, way beyond the Parent-Child relationships of conventional marketing.

I see you've moved over to Typepad and the Six Apart people really seem to have got the community idea. I've just adopted Movable Type - it's not an "easy" customer experience but I really love that my tech support comes from an army of enthusiastic fellow users.

[John Cass]

All this talk of right and wrong way to market, along with the comments about community reminds me of a book called "The power of two." The book describes how companies can form partnerships to provide a richer solution to customers. Often partnerships fail because companies don't know how to partner, they don't build a plan to partner with another company. Just sign a contract and expect things will happen. When they don't people think that partnering does not work. I think business people often don't do enough planning and as a result what they call marketing turns into sales tactics, or a return to what they at the very least have found successful. Marketing planning to me is partially about building a process for the capture of new ideas and describing the process of how to implement those ideas. A quick marketing plan can be described as follows:

* Situation Analysis
* Objective
* Strategy
* Tactics
* Budget/resources

The older I get the more I seem to understand that the situation analysis section of a marketing plan is really the most important part, it provides the analysis of customer needs and industry environment that usually help you to easily come up with answers to the rest of the plan.

[Dave Dolak]

The goal of marketing is to drives sales. Period.

All other marketing discussions typically involve how to choose the best marketing tactics and utilize & coordinate those tactics to drives those sales.

True marketers realize that this is a long-term strategy that must involve product development and an ongoing effort to satisfy customers to ever-higher levels of satisfaction while at the same time ensuring that one's offering represents unique value that cannot be found in competitive offerings.

Marketing to drive short-term sales is termed "sales promotion". Marketing to drive long-term is is called, well, "marketing".

Dave Dolak
TheMarketingGuyWhoDrivesSales.com
http://www.DolakBlog.com