Ammunition! Guns! A New Definition of Marketing
By Jared Smith - Incite Solutions Inc.
The terms 'marketing', 'branding', 'communications', and 'promotion' inevitably get caught in that buzzword abyss into which so many terms fall. In a recent seminar, I asked participants to define the word 'marketing'. Out of 30 people in the audience, there turned out to be 36 very different responses (apparently several people felt obliged to offer more than one version of the definition). Responses included, among others, the following:
- a business function of major public corporations such as McDonald's or The Brick
- anything that supports sales
- anything other than sales that supports business growth
- expensive, costly methods of communication that lack measurable results (my personal favorite)
During my third year of university, I sat through a marketing lecture titled "The Definition of Marketing". Our professor was of 1960s' vintage-and I had concrete proof of this: his class hand-outs on the definition of marketing were photocopies of documents copyrighted for October of 1965. In hindsight, I'm surprised we didn't revolt against some of his outdated ideas-after all, this was 1996 and business had certainly changed since the '60s! (Ironically, I think the faculty's marketing tagline at the time was something like, "forward thinking and knowledge for the future".)
During that fateful class, my prof's authoritative notes defined marketing in militaristic terms. "Weapons" of mass media and "guerilla warfare" were used to "penetrate the defenses" of "targeted" markets resulting in a number of "hits", a small percentage of which would hopefully be translated into enough "kills" to traverse the "enemy terrain", "destroy" the competition, and justify the marketing defense spending budget! Ultimately, it appeared to us, marketing was a game of risk, and the losers were sure to have their battleships sunk.
In spite of failing to organize a campus revolt, I did resolve to determine whether or not I could come up with a new and improved definition of marketing-depending on whether or not the market needed one. Not for the last time by any means, I was about to embark on what my wife Jess would later coin, "another one of Jared's dorky marketing expeditions."
Through conversations with hundreds of business owners, countless hours of research, and a great deal of luck, Incite has developed another definition of marketing for you. It has occurred to us that marketing is a great deal more than what my '60s vintage prof told me in 1997. Drum role please....
Marketing: Any method of communication that creates and maintains an organization's ideal relationships.
With this new definition, our clients have changed the way they attract new business using a process that we have created involving the following steps:
- Identify your ideal relationships (i.e. suppliers, referral sources, clients, and staff)
- Evaluate the messaging that you use to communicate with them (ensure that it is unique and consistent)
- Review the mediums you have at your disposal to engage them with your message (think creatively; for instance, your office furniture and the way you dress can do more damage to your communicative effectiveness than can a terrible brochure)
- Enhance your mediums and use them on a regular and repeated basis to engage your ideal relationships
- Drive your new wheelbarrow full of cash to the bank
