Marketing adds what's missing.
As you may have noticed, we’re big advocates of expanding the typical view of marketing beyond simply communications. Our belief in marketing as a service is simply one aspect of this.
However, a recent conversation with my family over the holidays about what it was that we’re actually working on made me think a bit more about this. It’s not that anything we’re doing runs counter to the idea that actions speak louder than words. It’s rather that we’ve found ourselves doing a lot more than just creating services – none of which would have qualified as traditional marketing in our old world.
I think the answer lies in the true role of marketing. Late last year, the AMA issued a revised definition (pictured above). The key point for me is the idea that marketing is whatever it takes to deliver value to customers…
Because value is a complex formula (far more so than I’ve made it seem below), and different for each product, service or situation, it requires marketing to be flexible enough to assess what’s missing and deliver the appropriate response.
If the product is:
a) great
b) well designed
c) offers great value for money
d) fills a very useful and immediately obvious role in people’s lives
but..
e) isn’t well known
then a mass advertising campaign may do the trick. If it’s lacking in any of the above attributes you may need to look elsewhere for a solution. I’d argue that marketing can (and should) be proposed as a solution to fixing any of the items a) through d), but it won’t happen by simply developing a message regardless of how clever that message is.