Let's Begin with Marketing!

Whether talking about churning ads through television or leveraging blogs marketing is best summed up with Peter Drucker’s statement, “The aim of marketing is to make selling unnecessary.”

In my opinion, the video “What is Marketing?” was quite entertaining and spoke to plenty of the stigmas surrounding professionals in the marketing space. In its simplest form, marketing is the act of bringing products to the market, once in the market the laws of supply and demand take over. The self-proclaimed marketer in the video explores this simple definition a bit deeper explaining that marketers leave this well-defined world and turn “evil” when they aim at bringing a product to market that is known to be detrimental to the good of mankind. From this perspective it seems that this clip serves as a simple platform in stating that while some marketers are “evil” most are good.

The second video, “A Short Introduction to Marketing” is just that. It serves as an introduction to marketing in its simplest form. It introduces the CVP principle and the four P’s of marketing. The video then goes on to examine a simple example of a marketing practice and the cyclical nature of planning, marketing, bringing the product to market and gaining feedback. This look at marketing is focused on the traditional approach without accounting for the recent paradigm shift in marketing to the internet.

Professor Philip Kotler presents his definition of marketing as (CCDVTMP) create, communicate and deliver value to a target market at a profit. What’s interesting about this video is the discussion on managing the brand for an organization. What we’ve seen recently is a departure from this school of thought. In The Long Tail, Anderson talks about the recent “marketing” campaign by GM to boost sales of the Tahoe during the gasoline price spike in 2006. In this case the decision was made to create a forum for any and everybody to upload potential commercials to the internet on GM’s website. This was originally thought to be detrimental when multiple negative ads were posted on the site, yet proved to be quite effective in boosting sales. This move took the years of brand management that GM has invested in and threw it out the window, yet proved effective.

Seth Godin presents marketing as, spreading your idea to your audience. Godin starts out with a brief look at where marketing used to flourish. Television. Seth then explores the shift in marketing to targeting the innovators and early adopters since the early and late majority who are exceptionally good at ignoring marketing efforts. “Sell to people who are listening and maybe they’ll tell their friends.” The riskiest thing that a company can do is be average and safe.