Mary On Marketing
By Mary Malone ©2002   

To Market To Market

      Marketing is the most used and misused word in the business lexicon. It is the most used because it offers new hope for declining sales. It is the most misused because it brings the fear of conceptual change.

      The hope and fear are both real. Business people need to overcome the fear of change to cash in on this new hope for better sales curve through marketing.

      Marketing is in the spotlight because it recognizes the end of the age of consumption. For fifty years America has been on a spending spree. Through five decades anyone could sell anything to anybody; now the sated consumer has become a very selective buyer. Current economic trends suggest that the public will be even more selective, indeed a reluctant buyer. What’s more, there is no longer a mass market. There is only a market made up of very different buyer groups. No longer will one appeal reach all.

      What then is marketing? It’s the art of finding out what the customer wants and then designing, building, pricing, packaging, distributing, displaying, advertising, promoting, and selling the product or service so that the customer buys the marketer’s brand over the competitive brands offered. Notice that marketing isn’t one thing. It is a whole package of things that starts and ends with the customer.

      It has been wisely said that marketing companies think outside/in, while companies that sell think inside/out GM, Kodak, and IBM, among other biggies, let success, pride and ego combine to build an inside/out mindset. They all paid an extreme price in serious loss of market share before acknowledging the importance of the customer and reverting to an outside/in mentality.

      Companies considering this conceptual change probably don’t have a qualified marketer on their staff. They must go outside for a full time marketing professional, or in the alternative, a marketing consultant. A consultant better uses the trade awareness of the existing staff without posing a threat to it. Additionally, on a contractual basis a consultant works without the cost of carrying an employee on the payroll.

       Stop, look and listen! Don’t even consider bringing aboard a marketing person until the company, top to bottom, sees the need and is ready, even eager, to execute a marketing plan.