Marketing 101a

This begins a series on marketing. I’ll dispense with the quotes I usually use because I couldn’t find any that I thought were appropriate for this discussion. If you consider yourself to be a pretty savvy marketer, this may be too elementary for you, but for everyone else, read on.

Many small business people are unsure what marketing really is. Everybody engages in marketing or they couldn’t be in business. But often, marketing activities are not done in a systematic, coordinated, strategic way. So let’s begin by talking about what marketing is . . . and what it is not.

Small business people sometimes use the terms “marketing” and “sales” interchangeably as though they are two different names for the same thing. They are not. Sales and marketing are entirely different activities. A friend of mine says it this way: “The job of marketing is to deliver customers for the sales force to sell.” That’s a pretty good definition, I think.

In order to deliver customers that our sales force can sell, marketing must answer a number of fundamental but critically important questions.

- What product or service do we want the sales force to sell?
- What problem will our offering solve, what need will it fill, or what want will it satisfy?
- Who is our prime prospect (the ideal customer who has the problem, need, or want we’ve identified)?
- How do we intend to deliver our product or service? Through retail channels? Via the internet? Through distributors and wholesalers?
- Where should we set our price? That is, what is our prime prospect willing to pay for our product or service?
- Who else is already in the marketplace selling a similar product or service, and how will we differentiate ourselves from them?

The list goes on, but you get the idea. Marketing is the highest strategic activity in any company because if we get marketing wrong, it doesn’t matter how strong we are financially, how efficient we are operationally, or what a great sales force we have. If marketing is wrong, we can’t survive as a company. If we offer a product or service that doesn’t address the problem or need or want it was intended to, we won’t be able to sell it. If we offer it at too high a price, we won’t be able to sell it. In short, marketing will have failed in its mission to deliver customers.

OK, so now we know what marketing is and what it’s supposed to do. In the next few postings, we’ll explore in more detail some of the questions above that marketing needs to answer correctly.

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