A MARKETING WORKSHOP

A few years back I attended a marketing workshop...

The presenter was American; whether that means anything to you or not. There was a sense of "authority" in the air as he walked out onto the stage, even before he spoke.

The middle aged gentleman, his name badge read "Michael", sitting beside me, leaned towards me to comment on how "brilliant" the presenter was: "He started off at a very young age you know; collecting recyclables and earning a few dollars here and there, and today, he is a millionaire!"

Fair enough, I thought, but little did "Michael" know that I didn't pay NZD$1,999 to come to this workshop, nor did I know who the presenter was, nor how brilliant he was. The ticket was in fact a present from a friend's dad who could no longer attend.

As the presenter adjusted his microphone, the room was still. I did wonder who this "brilliant" man was, as the attention he commanded was great, again, even before he spoke.

And then he spoke: "What is marketing?"

Excellent question!

I listened intently as he spoke for the next 3 hours. He was very animated to say the least; waving his arms, jumping on and off the chair... The room was bursting with laughter at his antics and we were all hanging off his every word.

At 11am we stopped for morning tea. Michael came up to me with a big smirk on his face: "What did I tell you Mary*? The guy is brilliant isn't he?"

"He really is!" I agreed. In my mind I was going through the last three hours, giggling to myself at some of the quick-witted jokes the presenter came up with, when it dawned upon me: "This guy's not a Marketing Guru, he's a Salesperson!"

He is selling himself to us this entire time, and he is yet to answer the question he himself posed to us: "What is marketing?"

Sure he threw around a lot of "marketing" words: promotion, advertising, branding... but the statements were mostly generic Wikipedia definitions, common sense comments; which is probably why we all related so well to what he was saying - because we heard it all before!

SO, WHAT IS MARKETING?

We all would agree that marketing is vital for business growth. When our sales are up we think we are spot on with our marketing. Similarly, when sales are down; marketing is to blame. But for a business function that we hang the success of our organizations on, marketing is a phenomenon we know quite little about. At best, our marketing efforts are a selection of ad-hoc processes that do very little to affect sales.

In a very insightful article on marketing, Tony Rizzo shares Eli Goldratt's analogy about marketing and duck hunting. It goes a little something like this:

• If selling were the same as shooting sitting ducks while they ate corn by the side of a lake...
• Then advertising would be spreading the corn for the ducks to see and come to eat, whilst...
• Marketing would be figuring out how much corn is needed, the best places to lay the corn, and what grade of corn to use.

Read more...