Marketing

We all have a very distinct and personal point-of-view of the work involved when we hear that term.  But so many of us think of marketing in terms of promotion.  Simply not the case of course.  Most of you are familiar with the expression that 50% of all advertising is wasted, we're just not sure which 50%.  Well this type of thinking once again lives in the downstream promotion end of the marketing cycle.  But please don't think of Marketing as exclusively sales and promotion.  A better more productive way to view marketing - is to always frame the definition in terms of a market-driven company or one that defines itself by the customers it wishes to serve rather than the capabilities it wishes to sell and promote.  In this scenerio, there is very little promotion necessary - to sell.  Marketing is knowing what to build and for whom by understanding your buyers and creating great content that they wish to consume.  This brands your company (or product) as the expert - and quite frankly from that vantage point, the rest is easy.  The father of modern marketing management, Peter Drucker, supports this further, ""There will always be a need for some selling.  But the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.  The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits and sells itself.""  Best get that consumer market research report out again...