We made some important discoveries. We made a brief call to Harvard and London Business Schools to see what they were teaching on their marketing courses. No change there; it was marketing as we knew it and understood it to be.
So who are the mourners at marketing’s graveside? Unsurprisingly, many of them came from the ailing worlds of traditional promotions, old-style PR and advertising.
PR and advertising are not marketing. Digital content and social media are not marketing either. It’s simply media, no matter how well and how skilfully it’s written and developed.
Historically, PR and advertising formed the major part of the marketing budget. They were two ways of getting the message out to markets and as it transpired, they were often ineffective.
Joe Wanamaker, a father of modern advertising quipped wittily, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
Traditional advertising and PR are the old way of marketing. The world has changed, but the some of the same people are still making the same mistakes albeit via a different medium. For them marketing is the media, not the message.
A focus on promotion is tactical. Tactics removed from strategy don’t work. It’s what some of the old-style advertising and PR guys sold and frankly, they failed.
Real marketing starts before the product development process. It doesn’t start with a sales lead.
Frequently, the new riders of web promotions misquote Drucker often in an attempt to focus their clients away from strategy towards tactical promotions. Here’s a favourite, Drucker said, “…the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.” What Drucker was talking about was not marketing replacing sales, but that the product itself should come from a point of true understanding of the customer, their problems, interests, behaviours and needs. Marketing begins at the point of product conception. Product conception, for Drucker, is about innovation, about finding new ways to deliver value to satisfy the customer and the market.
The marketing doomsayers often claim that product development is not the role of the marketer, but that of the engineer. The notion that engineers and R&D develop products is a false and dangerous premise. Engineers and developers are problem solvers. They love a technical challenge. It’s why they do what they do. The role of marketing is to provide engineers with a problem to solve; a problem based on real market and customer issues, not just a technical challenge.
So what’s real marketing?
Real marketing is the conception of unique product value based on a deep understanding of customer values. It’s about listening to and understanding customers. It’s doing research and testing ideas. It’s about understanding the mass market and the price levels it will support.
If we’ve done our research well, then positioning the product to market is the easy part, as is promotion, since we can talk to people about their problem, issue or interest and tell them how we can address it.
Marketing is about selecting channels to market that have the coverage, reach and motivation to sell our products. It’s about understanding the competition and not trying to beat them at their own game, but doing something better. It’s also about distribution and mode of supply. Innovation may mean changing the business model to reach customers in a way that others have overlooked and finding new ways to reach non-customers. There’s branding, developing brand personality and a customer-centric culture…
That’s a little, but not all, of what real marketing is about.
Sure enough marketing has changed and continues to evolve. Harvard Business School says it well, “The current economic crisis is changing consumers' current and future purchase and consumption patterns. Search engines have changed the way consumers obtain information and make decisions and they are also dramatically changing the advertising industry. Social networks and user-generated content have opened a new way for consumers to engage with each other as well as with brands and companies. There are significant changes in the attitudes of consumers and companies about social issues (including the environment). Consumer preferences and choice of products are increasingly influenced by social factors.”
Finally, there’s an acid test for buying marketing services – see if your prospective supplier puts customer research high on their service list. If they don’t, then walk away no matter what they say about social media and engaging in customer dialogue. Customer engagement is imperative: dialogue is only meaningful when you can talk on your customer’s own terms. If the marketer doesn’t relate to customer issues before the conversation, the chances are that they don’t believe in dialogue at all.
Marketing is alive and well. Traditional promotions, whatever the medium, are dying on the vine. Promotions are one small part of tactical marketing implementation. Without clear and well-articulated strategic intent, positioning, strong messaging, and compelling, meaningful, consistent branding, promotions are like a football team without a goal at which to aim.
Marketing is evolving as are advertising and PR. They are being transformed by the world of the Internet, the redistribution of global economic power, the informed and empowered consumer, and an unpredictable economy. Its best practitioners and there are many of them, some brilliant, are reinventing themselves, us included. The new marketing reaches out beyond the material and tangible world…from the rational and the functional towards emotions, values and behaviours…to how one feels about a company, its brand and a product, rather than the intrinsic nature of the entity itself. There’s a significant growing body of research that shows that cognitive decisions are based primarily on emotions qualified by an act of post-rationalisation. Emotions become the key differentiator in a world that offers increasingly convergent product identities and functionality. Emotions are the reaction to the brand and quality is the subjective evaluation of its customer and the audience. That’s important. Quality and value are not something you build into products, that’s reliability. Quality and value are what you feel about the product or brand and it’s entirely subjective.
Finally, I’ll lighten up and let someone else do the talking. It’s Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of the Ogilvy and Mather Group, a brilliant advertiser, who’s becoming an equally brilliant pioneer of the “new marketing”. Here he talks about perception and intangible value. It’s engaging and entertaining to watch and contains some big lessons presented in a very amusing way. It’s worth your time.
Geoffrey Wilkins
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