WHAT THE HECK IS MARKETING ALL ABOUT?

Wiki's definition of marketing, 

“Marketing is the study and management of exchange relationships. Marketing is used to create, keep and satisfy the customer with the customer as the focus of its activities” 

What authors got to say 

Kotler 

“Marketing is the process by which companies create value for customers and build strong customer relationships in order to capture value from customers in return”. 

Ryan holiday 

“Anything and everything you do that grows the business or that gets customers can be considered marketing” 

Seth Godin 

“Marketing is the story marketers tell to customers. It is about spreading ideas” 

Al Ries 

“Marketing is the science and art of exploring, creating, and delivering value to satisfy the needs of a target market at a profit” 

And the list goes on. 

The definitions of marketing vary based on perspective. Any student who has had the luck of developing an interest in the subject of marketing is likely to read a lot a books in the same with the hope of understanding the nuances of the subject. Such newbies are in for a hard luck. Various authors tell various views which are sometimes even contradictory. The books carry a message in the context in which they are written and to reflect the premise that the author is trying to prove.

Marketing prides itself on being a practical discipline, yet marketing textbooks never address solutions to practical questions, such as: 

· What will happen to sales if I change the price of my product? 

· Will the new brand cannibalise sales from the current brand? If so, by how much? 

· Should we retain existing customers or acquire new ones? 

· Should my target be more market share or more profit? 

· What should be the frequency of my advertisements? Should I vary my advertising to follow a seasonal pattern, oppose the seasonal pattern, or be the same all year? 

No generalizations and laws can be modeled thus. But uncovering patterns that generalize is the fundamental work of science. 

So what about the guy (I still support feminism) who spent hours and hours of time cramming up names of brands and sub brands, their line extensions, cross selling’s, promotions and advertisement campaigns. Well studies say an average human spends one third of his life sleeping. Surely they can dump a couple more hours non-productively. 

One has to understand that marketing is not a science (at least not yet). Marketers themselves often have no idea why one of their campaigns worked and others did not. One Harvard Business Review study found that 80 percent of marketers are unhappy with their ability to measure marketing return on investment (ROI). Not because the tools aren’t good enough, but because they’re too good, and marketers are seeing for the first time that their marketing strategies are “often flawed and their spending is inefficient”. 

Much of the marketers today work based on their gut feelings, impressions, accepted concepts and scattered bits of data. And that’s because there are no laws and generalizations in marketing. An architect designs a building based on the laws of physics. The laws of physics have objective validity. There is no chance that gravity will stop functioning tomorrow, even if I stop believing in it. But marketing has no such generalizations and is only inter- subjective. Meaning it exists only in the minds and subjective consciousness of people and can be considered a shared myth- just like religion, money, justice, god (I hope the lower case doesn’t derogate your fictional sentiments) and human rights. So it is easy for marketers to parrot nonsense simply because it appears to make sense and comforting. However, X is comforting doesn’t mean X is true.

So finally what the heck is marketing? Is it a science or not? 

How do you attempt to explain something which is in a state of constant radical flux? Like every living organism, marketing too suffers from the curse of the red queen. It has got to constantly adapt and evolve. Marketing is highly dynamic and it is in a state of continual emergence and experimentation. 

Instead of erecting castles in air, it is better to admit and accept that we have only the haziest notions about marketing and its practices. The study of marketing is so young that we would be arrogant to believe that we know it all, or even that we have got the basics right. 

But Marketing involves heuristics, relevant associations and memory structures. It is just psychology at practice. Still consumers are far too individual, irrational and emotionally distracted. This curtail shrouds marketing from eliciting laws and generalizations. Yet it is vital to attempt to question and describe them in detail. Otherwise we would be tempted to dismiss the very essence of human behavior because "everybody lives by selling something".

What worked yesterday is unlikely to work today. What worked for one company may not work for the other. This is exactly the reason why marketing seems irrational and inconsistent and faddy. The old marketing model is broken. What we don’t know yet is what the nature of the new model is that we are supposed to replace it with. 

So coming back, our “I know all brand names and campaigns” guy, in order to become a consummate marketer has to understand that a study from one single set of data, collected from one particular company(or book), in one particular set of conditions has got zero generalizability of the finding. His take can only be the viewpoint and later work out its applicability (or not!) in his work situation. 

The subject of Marketing should (and can) only answer our question of how to think, not what to think!! 

HAPPY READING!! 

PS: I am not the author but merely the writer. The points are merely abstracts from various books I’ve read. I only paraphrase!!