Simon Middleton - What You Need to Know About Marketing

This is the stuff youve always been embarrassed to ask about the world of modern business.

The What You Need to Know books can get you up to speed on a core business subject fast. Whether its for a new job, a new responsibility, or a meeting with someone you need to impress, these books will give you what you need to get by as someone who knows what theyre talking about.

Each book contains:

• What Its all About a summary of key points

• Who You Need to Know the basics about the key players

• Who Said It quotes from key figures

• What You Need to Read books and online resources for if you want to deepen your knowledge

• If You Only Remember One Thing a one-liner of the most important information

You might also want to know:

• What You Need to Know about Business
• What You Need to Know about Economics
• What You Need to Know about Project Management
• What You Need to Know about Strategy
• What You Need to Know about Leadership
• What You Need to Know about Starting a Business

This edition first published 2011

2011 Simon Middleton

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Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

9780857081506 (paperback), 9780857081704 (epub),

9780857081711 (emobi), ISBN 9781119974881 (ebk)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

INTRODUCTION

I have a good friend who hates marketing. She thinks its of dubious morality and questionable effectiveness. Actually, she thinks marketing is rubbish. Well thats not the word she uses, but you get the idea.

Its hardly surprising she feels this way. And shes not alone. Marketing has a bad reputation. Worse still it has a hugely confused and confusing one. It is often considered to be synonymous with spin or manipulation (bad things and the work of evil geniuses in the view of its opponents). Equally it is often dismissed as stuff and nonsense (and therefore condemned as the work of fools who arent capable of doing proper jobs).

Evil genius or pointless nonsense? They cant both be true. Can they?

In fact marketing is probably one of the earliest activities ever undertaken by mankind, after hunting, making fire and building shelter. Because marketing, when you get right down to it, is based on the simple idea of exchange between people.

I have some fresh meat because I spent my day hunting. You have sharper tools than me because you spent your day flint-knapping. If I give you a leg of my deer, will you give me one of your stone knives so I can skin the beast? Fair exchange is no robbery, as we may well have grunted to each other back then. Thats exchange, the swapping of something of value for something of roughly (estimated, negotiated and agreed) equal value.

Thats not marketing in its totality of course, but it is the heart of the matter. One cave dweller approaching another with the deer-leg for flint knife proposition is marketing, albeit of a primitive sort. The initiator with the fresh deer in this case is the marketer, and the flint-knapper is the customer. Although it could have been the other way round. Take this thought experiment a little further. Our deer hunter discovers a real talent for catching deer and offers to specialise in this, trading the resulting abundance of fresh meat with others in the clan, in exchange for gathered fruit, or arrows, or some paint for the cave walls! Suddenly weve got a small business. A business which has relationships with customers. And the word that most accurately describes those relationships is: marketing.

Because fundamentally marketing is about relationships. And if we flash forward a few millennia to the present day, when marketing is more sophisticated than it has ever been before, we discover that marketing is still about relationships, and that marketing still lies at the very centre of this human activity that we call business.

Of course if we didnt need or want to exchange (to do business with each other) then we wouldnt need to do marketing. And you wouldnt need to read this book. But the reverse is also true. If we dont do marketing, then we cant do business. Or to put it more bluntly: if we dont understand marketing and do it well, then our businesses (or our charity, or even our public sector organisation) will under-perform, perhaps to the point of going under. And the sad truth is that many businesses dont do marketing well, at all.

We live and work and trade in challenging times. Too many businesses are focused on every aspect of what they do (from technology to cost cutting) apart from the one which could make such a huge difference to their fortunes: their marketing.

This book isnt a history of marketing, or a philosophical exploration of marketing. Neither is it a detailed action plan which will solve all your marketing problems for you. This book tells you what you really need to know about marketing: and it assumes, to be on the safe side, that you may not have known very much about marketing before you picked it up. If you only ever read one book about the subject, then if its this one youll have the essential concepts to help you to understand and ultimately to do marketing better (or at least to contribute to its being done by someone else in your company or organisation).

A final point before we begin: although I refer repeatedly in this book to companies and businesses, dont let this put you off if you work in a charity or a public sector organisation. The essential truths and concepts of marketing are equally applicable in the private, public and voluntary sectors, just as they are to organisations ranging in size from one person and his dog through to global super companies.

The absolute, number one, most important, and sacrosanct principle of marketing is that its about customers. CUSTOMERS! That really cant be stressed enough, because so many people think that marketing is either synonymous with sales, or is primarily concerned with advertising or other promotional activity. But it isnt: its about customers, and to be even more specific its about relationships with customers. To go back briefly to our cave dwellers: its the relationship between them (which leads to the agreement between them) that is the really important part of the deal, rather than the deer leg or the stone tool in themselves. The point behind this is that marketing is not actually about selling as such but about fulfilling and satisfying the needs of your customer.