Marketing isn’t just another name for:
- Selling
- Advertising
- Common sense
- Business
- [geoads2]
Many companies who attempt to embrace marketing often make one of the following mistakes:
Sales Department Marketing
The Sales Manager adds or changes his/her job title to include the word marketing. The actions taken are usually to do with price and discounting, but ignore product/service decisions, value, quality, etc. They forget customer needs.
Art Department Marketing
The company bolts on a specialised department to look after marketing. It usually ends up looking at sales promotion ideas and improvements in the post-sale Customer Service area.
Formula Marketing
Marketing as control. Analysis of data, lots of discussion about the theory of marketing. Specialises in 20/20 hindsight decisions, always knowing why it went wrong or didn’t work after the fact.
Money Marketing
All decisions are taken based on a tight definition of short-term financial return. R & D, product development, long planning tends not to happen.
[geoads3]
These approaches suggest that REAL marketing has four key features:
- Starting with the customer
- Having a longer perspective
- Using all the company’s resources
- Innovation
