Why Marketing Matters
Individual interpretation of the marketing function appears to be driven by (and rather unfortunately limited to) the realm of the interpreter’s experience. When I am not pitching a client, I frequently hear casual conversations where marketing is confused with sales, advertising, design or other niche function.
A Better Definition of Marketing
The American Marketing Association defines marketing as “the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.” Many other firms and organizations have similar definitions. But what does this mean for a small business?
Peter Drucker, management guru, defines it quite succinctly when he said “The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.” The idea is that marketing can help a company to understand its customer so well that its product or service effectively sells itself.
To achieve this, we require a number of distinct but inter-related competencies. Having worked with large-cap and start-up clients across multiple industries around the globe, I have found that marketing needs generally fall into the following categories:
– Business planning: developing the idea behind a business, assessing market demand and evaluating the feasibility of the revenue model (Market research and business case development)
– Marketing strategy: building a marketing plan to enter a new market or grow your market share (Segmentation-Targeting-Positioning (STP), pricing, growth strategy and competitive strategy)
– Brand strategy: identifying key differentiators for your company and using them to build mindshare (Corporate identity, logo design, co-branding and product or service branding)
– New business development: building your pipeline and attracting and retaining clients (Sales management and client relationship management)
– Strategic communications: Aligning all internal/external communications to speak to the market with one voice (Integrated marketing communications, direct marketing campaigns and marketing collateral development)
– Media relations: determining how you respond to or interact with all journalists and multimedia channels (Public relations and crisis management)
– Event management: project management and logistics to bring an event to fruition (Event planning and sponsorship management)
– Digital marketing: developing your web presence and taking your marketing initiatives online (Website development, search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click advertising (PPC) and affiliate marketing)
– Advertising: sponsored advertisements through multimedia channels (Advertising campaign development and media planning)
– Marketing analytics: measuring and benchmarking the performance of your marketing campaigns (Marketing ROI and decision analysis)
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