Article: What is Marketing?

Let’s play a little game. You get the answer to this next question correct and we’ll… Buy you an ice-cream I guess: What is Marketing?

Easy right? Well what most people answer would be something along the following lines:

• It’s the advertisements you use both offline and online.
• It’s Posters you put up around town.
• Digital Marketing is SEO and keywords, and google ads and all of that.
• Why do I care?

… *silence*…

Well those are not really correct answers, no. Some of them are types of marketing, sure – but they’re not marketing.

Let’s quote the brilliant example from the book “The One Page Marketing Plan” by Allan Dib – imagine you’re with the Circus and you tour around different villages.

If you go around the next village you will be visiting within a week and put posters up all over, then that is Advertisement.

If you decide to paint the saddle of your elephant with news about your upcoming show and walk with it through this next town, then that is called Promotion.

If your elephant goes ahead and walks through the vegetable patch of the mayor, and the local newspaper publishes a story on this, then that is called Publicity.

However, if the mayor laughs off the incident, then that is Public Relations.

Then furthermore, if you have made a considerable amount of money from your travels and you wish to begin financially supporting your local football team so that everyone who watches them sees your name on their kits, then that is called Sponsorship.

Finally (at least in the depth that we are delving into it here), you also have the perception of the public of you, and that right there is called Branding.

Right, so now we know what all these different examples are, but we still haven’t answered our original question now, have we?

Marketing includes all of the above because they’re all the tactics marketing uses to accomplish its goals. Marketing is the science of Planning and Strategizing. Marketing plans for a lot of firms are incredibly complex and find a way to reach the firm’s vision of what it wishes to become by designing Strategic Goals, followed by Tactical Goals, and finally the Operational, or day-to-day tasks required to achieve each of the above goals.

For SME’s this sort of plan is often never done as it costs a lot of time and money to create. However even a single page document, again mentioning this book – The One page marketing plan allows you to quickly create a vision for your company for you to follow. A quote from Benjamin Franklin which my brother loves to quote “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail”. You must know your destination, or at the very least your heading, before you get into the driver’s seat of your business.

Marketing takes into account the dynamic marketplace using various analysis from SWOT, to PESTLE, to Porter’s Five Forces and many others to determine alongside those who run the business what direction the company wants to go in and should go in. Cross-departmental strategy creation is vital. Input from every person is ideal, or at the very least a representative or head of each faculty. This way, you know that if you are planning to expand to a global marketplace, your operations department can handle the load and vice-versa. Even for an SME, marketing should take into account all parts of your business, translate them onto a single page and you should develop your plan from there. Failing to do so may result in catastrophe.

Multiple great books have been written on the topic and we will review several of them in our “Book Review” Series until the day we decide to even write our own maybe! Stay tuned for more!

Written by Lenard Adanov