Posts Tagged ‘marketing’

They said it:

Friday, December 24th, 2010

Values, Mission and Vision

There is more to business than making money. Profit maximization (enterprise value maximization, to be more precise) provides the foundation for strategy analysis, yet [profit] is not the goal that inspired Henry Ford to build a business that profoundly changed twentieth-century lifestyles; nor is it the one that causes Bill Gates to continue working at Microsoft rather than enjoy retiring to enjoy his billions of dollars of personal wealth; nor does making money for shareholders provide motivation or direction to the thousands of employees of both companies. Most successful companies are fired with a sense of purpose that extends well beyond the desire for wealth. Dennis Bakke, founder of the international power company AES, argues:

“Profits are to business as breathing is to life. Breathing is essential to life, but it is not the purpose for living. Similarly, profits are essential for the existence of the corporation, but they are not the reason for its existence.”

From “Contemporary Strategy Analysis” by Robert M. Grant, p. 57.

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Marketing is … (one more time)

Tuesday, December 21st, 2010
It’s been said and written about so many times by many people (Levitt, McKenna, Drucker and others), marketing is so much more than ads, slogans and promotions. Marketing is too important to entrust a vice-president and department to it. It’s not a specialized activity at all. It’s everything you do. It’s your business from it’s final result, a satisfied Customer.

Marketing is what happens in all the Customer touch points across your entire organization. Every time a customer comes into contact with you organization, you’re marketing. It’s the materials you choose to put into your products and the suppliers you choose to buy them from. It’s the type of services you offer to support your Customers before and after the sale. It’s the people you hire to do the work and the type of machines and information technologies they use to produce them and make them better. It’s the partners you collaborate with to create a new service offering. It’s how you design your organization to take advantage of market opportunity and the business model you use to keep it aligned when your markets shift (and they shift every day – there, they shifted. Did you notice?). Most important of all, marketing is the Customers you choose to business with and the ones you don’t.

Everybody does marketing. You’re either doing it well or badly or somewhere in between. And please, let’s get over this idea that marketing is something that only large corporations and retail firms do. Small, owner-managed businesses, non-profits, social enterprises, government organizations and religious groups all “do marketing”. The first questions aren’t “should we do marketing?” and “can we afford it?” but rather, “what kind of marketing are we doing?” and “how effective is it at delivering results?”

In short, marketing is a mind-set. It’s an attitude that pervades at all levels throughout your entire organization that is constantly watching for changes in the business environment and uses that knowledge to quickly adapt itself to take full advantage of those changes.

In my next post I will discuss the question “Who is your Customer?”

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