In a language with more than its fair share of misused words and multiple meanings, one of the most mangled must surely be the seemingly simple descriptor "marketing".
This innocuous little word means many more things to many more people than such a simple word has any right to. It can confer great importance or great mundanity. It can be the subject of professional pride or terminal career inadequacy. It can describe magnificent successes…or just cover a multitude of sins best swept under the carpet and called – well, marketing.
When large corporations do it – it’s Marketing with a capital ‘M’. It’s big, expensive stuff, and it must work because we know it regularly manages to make inferior products and services more successful than their intrinsic usefulness would suggest. Even our comparatively recent history is littered with examples of clunky products that swept their much superior competitors off the table and into the trash can of obsolescence – apparently due to little more than Smart Marketing. You may recall a few of those products.
Then we have that other marketing. The cheap, trashy marketing that conjures images of bundles of unread leaflets blowing out of rubbish bins, surreptitiously dumped by unscrupulous leaflet-droppers keen to get home early by cutting a few (street) corners.
Which of these then, is the real Marketing? Is it one of the above, all of the above, or none of the above?
Well, let me ask you the big question - what do you think marketing is?
Perhaps you consider marketing to be the slightly misogynistic art of draping attractive ladies on car bonnets at glitzy launch events? Or do you call that sales?
Is marketing the local supermarket ‘Bogof ‘offer (But One Get One Free...)? Or is that a sales discount?
Is marketing what you get on shopping channels that charge £80 for non-stick pans that sound fantastic on TV, but in reality stop being non- sticky after you use them twice, and fall apart two weeks after purchase? Or is that just old fashioned ‘Del-Boy’ sales shtick?
Perhaps you consider marketing to be all the boring stuff that sales people can't or won't do- stuff like market research (yawn), campaigns (urgh), and bar charts that marketing folks pore over endlessly as if they held the essence of life itself?
Or, as we first discussed, is marketing just the leaflets that fall out of your Sunday supplement, forcing you to scoop them up from the carpet and send them to a dishonourable fate in the overflowing Saturday night rubbish bin?
Well, if you have been indulging me so far, perhaps at least one of the above scenarios strikes you as a decent definition of marketing. You may even have already checked your online dictionary just to see if the simple entry therein will quash the argument, allowing you to save valuable time reading the rest of this article without worrying that there is a hidden truth about to be unveiled which might be worth knowing.
Let me help you there – the Cambridge online dictionary defines marketing as “a job that involves encouraging people to buy a product or service”. Hmmm, is that not Sales?
And while we are on the subject of online searches, if you have ever searched for marketing subjects online, you will perhaps have noticed that there is no current shortage of marketing blogs dispensing marketing bon mots. Marketing is a popular subject to write about, if nothing else.
And that, really, is our problem. Marketing attracts a lot of wordage precisely because it is a vast subject. It is all of these things I mentioned, plus 100 more definitions that could easily fill 1000 more blogs, already has filled 10,000 blogs, and surely will still be discussed endlessly as long as there are blogs, books, magazines, newspapers and the written word in general.
Let me put it this way. I think if you were on that well-known US quiz show where the answer you have to give is actually the question, and the quizmaster tells you what he/ she thinks marketing is – I think this might well be the longest ever question on that show’s history. (“I forgot the beginning of the question, but I think the answer you were looking for was ‘What is Marketing?’”)
So, given that marketing is such a vast and multi-faceted subject, what can we say that it is, in relation to our daily business concerns? The daily business concerns of the small businesses that make up the vast majority of the business landscape in our country?
One thing that marketing most certainly is to us, I would contend, is a very devalued word. All things which become used to the point of overuse become devalued by definition. In a world of commoditization, marketing is one of the ultimate commodities – all things to all people, not many things to many people, and nothing at all to some people.
If you are one of the ‘some people’ who have overlooked marketing precisely because of its ubiquity, this article is especially for you.
Because – here it is folks, the big ending I have been building towards - the answer to the question ‘What is Marketing’ is simple – but it only applies to YOU. YOUR answer is different from the lady sitting next to you, the chap down the corridor, and the millions of small businesses that share the same daily concerns as you
YOUR marketing might well be 1,000 leaflets in your local Sunday Supplement. It might very well be a detailed look at your target market via some intensive marketing research and impenetrable-looking bar charts. It might even involve tastefully clothed ladies (or gents) draped over a car bonnet.
But whatever it is, it will be YOUR marketing. It will work for you, and for nobody else.
In my next article, I will look at some of the different types of Marketing, and try to define their relevance to different types of business situation. Wish me luck, I have 10,000 Blogs to live up to.
