Marketing is Business

If there’s one thing you need to get right in business, it’s marketing.  Wow.  Just like that I offended 99% of the business world that thinks they are not in marketing.

What about finance?  No profit, no business, right?  Or HR… ever try running a business without people?  Those are accurate and valid points, but a fundamental look at marketing will show that it encompasses all those other great and important aspects of business.  Take finance for example.  One of the four P’s of marketing is price.  The price needs to be set at a point that is profitable and sellable. How about operations?  If you are applying lean principles and mapping the value stream, this advanced operations model starts to look a lot like the marketing concept of value chain analysis.

Nothing happens until somebody makes a sale, so surely sales is most important, right?  Until you look at the four P’s again and see that sales is one of the most important promotional channels.

Another way to look at this came to me while reading, “The Richest Man in Babylon,” when the book referred to a character’s actions at the ancient commerce market as “marketing.”  The very root of the word marketing is market, which is another way of saying where the business is happening.

I think we’ve lost sight of what marketing can really be in an organization.  For the most part, I’ve been quite blessed to have been in organizations that give marketing a seat at every table possible.  I think too often marketing folks are thought of as the right brain creative types that use Photoshop.  While there is of course an element of that, I think the best and truest marketing folks find the balance and instead of free-wheeling creativity or ridged logic, they creatively apply logic.  In Seth Godin’s great book “The Icarus Deception,” Seth puts it much better than I do and talks about the creative importance of breaking the rules, but he logically tempers that by saying how important it is not to break all the rules, but instead knowing which rules to break.

It’s not that marketing should be sticking its nose in everything. It is that everyone in the organization needs to have a better understanding of marking and how it can break down silos and pull all the disciplines together.  Instead of offending the 99%, I think 100% of us are in marketing and we all can learn a lot by understanding all the facets of marketing… er, um… I mean business.