"Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department." In a truly great marketing organization, you can't tell who is in the marketing department. Everyone in the organization has to make decisions based on the impact on the customer.
Marketing is the business function that identifies unfulfilled needs and wants, defines and measures their magnitude, determines which target markets the organization can best serve, decides on appropriate products, services, and programs to serve these markets, and calls upon everyone to "think and serve the customer". From a societal point of view, marketing is the link between a society's material requirements and its economic patterns of response.
Yet, to many, marketing is seen narrowly as the art of finding clever ways to dispose of the company's products. Many people confuse marketing with sub functions such as advertising and selling. But authentic marketing is not the art of selling what you make as much as knowing what to make! It is the art of identifying and understanding customer needs and coming up with solutions that satisfy them and produce profit for the stockholders. Market leadership is gained by creating customer satisfaction through product innovation, product quality, and customer service. If these are absent, no amount of advertising, sales promotion, or salesmanship can compensate.
"While great devices are invented in the laboratory, great products are invented in the Marketing Department". There is a wide chasm between an invention and an innovation. Too many wonderful laboratory products are greeted with yawns or laughs. The duty of marketers is to "think costumer" and to guide companies and non-profit organizations into developing offers that are meaningful and attractive to target customers.
Market-oriented thinking is a necessity in today's competitive world. There are too many goods chasing too few customers. There are global gluts of steel, agricultural produce, automobiles, and many other products and services. Some companies are trying to expand the size of the market, but most are competing to enlarge their share of the existing market. As a result, there are winners and losers. The losers are those that bring nothing special to the market. I believe that if you can't bring something special to a market, you don't belong in it. The winners are those who carefully analyze needs, identify opportunities, and create value-rich offers for target customer groups that competitors can't match.
These are hard times for many companies. Problems, properly analyzed, are also opportunities. Companies such as McDonald's, Campbell's and IBM have shown a capacity to adapt by staying close to their markets and reading the signs. They know that the marketplace, not the factory, ultimately determines which companies will succeed. Too many of our major auto companies, electronic, steel and others didn't have their ears to the market and paid dearly- along with the rest of us- for their "marketing myopia".
Marketing thinking obviously isn't easy or it would be applied more successfully. Although it only takes a semester to learn marketing, it takes a lifetime to master it.. Marketing problems, it turns out, do not exhibit the neat quantitative properties of many problems in the production, accounting, and finance areas. Psychological forces play a large role, marketing expenditures affect demand and costs simultaneously, marketing plans shape and interact with other business function plans. Marketing decisions must be made in the face of insufficient information about processes that are dynamic. Lagged, stochastic, interactive, and downright difficult. However, this is not an argument for intuitive decision making. Rather it is an argument for improved strategic theory and sharper tools of analysis.
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