‘Marketing’ means many different things to different people. Therefore, a conversation that seeks to allocate marketing resources in the optimal manner is bound to be flawed.
To a plant manager, ‘marketing’ means the money spent to generate orders to keep his plant running, to an accountant, it is an expense code in the profit and loss, to a scientist it is an occasionally needed extravagance so people can see their brilliance, and to many marketing people it is going to lunch a lot.
It is none of these things, and all of them.
That is the problem.
So called marketers have for so long shovelled so much jargon, hyperbole, misunderstanding, fortune-telling, and flatulent bullshit onto the pile that they have forgotten, if they ever understood, the purpose is to find and serve customers.
We can only find our way back by taking advice from Aristotle, by identifying the foundational proposition and assumptions shape the investment. In other words, to define it from first principles, or, to quote Aristotle: ‘The first basis from which a thing is known’
In this case, the first principle stems from Peter Drucker’s immortal pronouncement ‘The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer’
Marketing is, or should be, the leader in that task, and everyone has a responsibility for a part of the equation.
Header: Once again, I thank Dilbert and his mentor Scott Adams for the insight
