Marketing is a simple discipline with a simple goal: make sure the product you're trying to sell is the product customers want to buy. Then teach your customers everything they need to know to make an informed purchasing decision.
Look at a basic example. Say that you're struggling to sell hot coffee in the Mojave desert. It's possible, of course, that you've just chosen a poor location. Maybe you've got the wrong product or the wrong customer base. For whatever reason, your business isn't working as you had hoped.
Marketing gives you the information you need to adapt your business to the existing environment. Staying with our basic example, marketing provides support for your decision to serve iced coffee instead of, or in addition to, hot coffee. Then we design a campaign to tell your customers about your new product and teach them why it's the best alternative to quench their desert-sized thirst.
Some think marketing is synonymous with advertising or public relations. That's part of it, of course, but there's much more.
Marketing analyzes the state of your business, the strength and weakness of your competitors, and your customer's needs. It allows you to craft and support a plan to sell more widgets, break into new markets, or penetrate an existing market more completely. Marketing can improve your pricing power or persuade your customers that they really want your higher-margin items.
Marketing is more than an academic pursuit. It's not academic when you use marketing to solve real problems and improve your business' results.
Small businesses and entrepreneurs use me as their part-time marketing department. Larger companies use my services to outsource some of their creative production. And web designers, PR agencies and advertising agencies use me to position their client's businesses and products in the customer's mind to be remarkable, memorable and unique.
In the end, what matters is whether your product is the one your customer wants to buy. Marketing makes certain you know what your customer wants.
You might also want to look at a new project my friends and I are working on:
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