A Marketer's View
Marketing and its primary sub-categories, advertising and public relations, have earned well-deserved recognition as a primary factor in business and brand building – and more. The late Peter Drucker, widely regarded as the most important business management figure of the 20th Century, expressed it this way:
“Business has two basic functions: Innovation and Marketing. These produce results. All the rest are costs.”
This quote may have been less remarkable had Drucker been a marketing person rather than the giant among management authorities that he was.
Perhaps equally unrecognized is the key role marketing plays as a business designer. Indeed, a well-conceived marketing plan causes a growth-driven business to take a good look at its resources and goals in an effort to order its priorities. It requires that it come to grips with such crucial issues as:
- High volume versus relative exclusivity
- Timing of product and service releases
- The realities of the competitive marketplace
- What benefits to emphasize
- Which consumers to target
- How to reach them.
Good marketing liberates a company from dependence on emotion, chance, lead-time and inertia, allowing it to focus on vital issues such as:
- What do we do best?
- Where are our high-profit opportunities?
- What are our key production and service capacities?
- What are the impacts of the economy and competition?
- What course is most likely to help us reach our goals?
Actually, marketing is not about sales; it is about profits. Among its pivotal qualities is its emphasis on timing and action. In the “natural” course of events (barring, of course, a weakened economy), a company with good people and products will, likely, grow –– even though at some random pace.
But, like an uncultivated garden, the weeds may eventually outgrow the crop.
Allan Starr,
President/CEO
Marketing Partners of Arizona