Why Marketing Matters

Despite the prominence of marketing within firm strategy, few companies truly understand what it entails. In conversations with entrepreneurs, business owners, executives and recruiters, not many outside the field (and arguably not many even within the field) possess a comprehensive understanding of what marketing can do when it is effectively planned and executed.

Individual interpretation of the marketing function appears to be driven by (and rather unfortunately limited to) the realm of the interpreter’s experience. When I am not pitching a client, I frequently hear casual conversations where marketing is confused with sales, advertising, design or other niche function.

A Better Definition of Marketing

The American Marketing Association defines marketing as "the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large." Many other firms and organizations have similar definitions. But what does this mean for a small business?

Peter Drucker, management guru, defines it quite succinctly when he said "The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous." The idea is that marketing can help a company to understand its customer so well that its product or service effectively sells itself.

To achieve this, we require a number of distinct but inter-related competencies. Having worked with large-cap and start-up clients across multiple industries around the globe, I have found that marketing needs generally fall into the following categories:

- Business planning: developing the idea behind a business, assessing market demand and evaluating the feasibility of the revenue model (Market research and business case development)

- Marketing strategy: building a marketing plan to enter a new market or grow your market share (Segmentation-Targeting-Positioning (STP), pricing, growth strategy and competitive strategy)

- Brand strategy: identifying key differentiators for your company and using them to build mindshare (Corporate identity, logo design, co-branding and product or service branding)

- New business development: building your pipeline and attracting and retaining clients (Sales management and client relationship management)

- Strategic communications: Aligning all internal/external communications to speak to the market with one voice (Integrated marketing communications, direct marketing campaigns and marketing collateral development)

- Media relations: determining how you respond to or interact with all journalists and multimedia channels (Public relations and crisis management)

- Event management: project management and logistics to bring an event to fruition (Event planning and sponsorship management)

- Digital marketing: developing your web presence and taking your marketing initiatives online (Website development, search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click advertising (PPC) and affiliate marketing)

- Advertising: sponsored advertisements through multimedia channels (Advertising campaign development and media planning)

- Marketing analytics: measuring and benchmarking the performance of your marketing campaigns (Marketing ROI and decision analysis)

By developing a better understanding of the marketing function and what it can contribute, this will enable your small business to set a more robust marketing strategy. It can aid you in integrating your marketing function and developing synergies that strengthen the effectiveness and coordination of your campaigns. You could use this as a framework to build mutually-supportive marketing objectives, enabling diverse teams to retain a focus on the same endgame. It also enables you to boost your talent development by identifying functional strengths and weaknesses of individual marketing team members. Last, but not least, it helps you to build internal support by helping company insiders appreciate the complexity of the marketing function. Whereas your corporate strategy sets the vision for your company, marketing develops new ways to get you closer to your customer, generate additional sales and build your strategy for future growth.

Towards an Integrated Marketing Function

Given the scope of marketing needs and expectations, how can an entrepreneur or small business owner profit from this information?

1. Structure your company with the Marketing lead reporting directly to your CEO (or at least one of the officers in the C-suite).
2. Make marketing the job of your entire company. Your marketing will be more effective if you keep everyone focused on the client and take suggestions on how to improve.
3. Raise the bar and develop higher expectations of your marketing function.
4. Understand that you don’t need to engage in all these activities. As with anything else, you don’t have to do everything on your own. Decide on what to focus on but understand the trade-offs and make an informed choice.
5. Based on your decision, decide which marketing activities to perform in-house and which to outsource (if necessary).

The marketing functions discussed are by no means comprehensive. Instead, they should serve as a springboard for further exploration. The key takeaway is that marketing is more than just sales or advertising. In fact, marketing is more than just the sum of its parts. With a truly effective marketing function, you can keep your customers happy, outperform your competitors and find new ways to grow.

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