Yes there is the dirty word again. Marketing!!!! The M-word. But what is marketing? Most of you who finished high school will come up with, the 4p’s. Price, place, product and promotion. The attention-paying-ones probably even dare to mention the Marketing Mix (4p’s mixed together). And guess what, I just gonna agree with them, these are facets of marketing.

But marketing has more to bring. The 4p’s and the Marketing Mix are most known since Kotler used them as the basis for marketing in his famous book: The Principles of Marketing. But as the name of his books says, these are just the principles.

Most people think sales/selling is marketing, so the irritating telephone salesmen or the pushing salesforce at your local mediastore are not marketing. They are only small parts of a marketing process. The same with design, the customer only sees the direct outcome of the design process, however all steps necessary to get to the design are not clearly visible for the customer. Same goes for marketing. When we talk about ‘real’ marketing we talk about the philosophy behind a product or a brand. This philosophy should support a long term plan to define all marketing activities needed to make the product or brand a success to their customers. Customers need change all the time and the marketing should be adjusted to that to remain ahead of the competition.

So to define marketing you should take all activities necessary to keep a product or brand ahead of their competitors. You can think about how to sell the product, how to keep up with the brand image, make sure all activities attribute to the brand image, furthermore also how the product should be designed to fit with the brand image. Also all external communications should be inline with the marketing plan.

This means the website, the hand-outs, service desk, cars, employees, everything you can think of that represents the company, should contribute to the company. Together all these activities and the plan that controls and dictates them are marketing. The big problem with marketing is when one little bit of the whole plan doesn’t fit, the whole plan will simply be ineffective. Therefore marketing should be spread all over all companies to make sure you get the best out of your company. So be creative and everything you can come up with that supports the company to reach it’s full potential might be marketing.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 12:00 and is filed under Column. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.