I was reading Kotler/Bloom’s Marketing Professional Services and was pleasantly reminded of the simplicity of my goal: “…the main task of the organization is to determine the needs and wants of target markets and to satisfy them through the design, communication, pricing, and delivery of appropriate and comptetitively viable offerings.”
So easy to say, difficult to execute.
Marketing in the electronic components marketplace is an interesting gig. I straddle the fence most days wondering if it’s the biggest marketing void I’ve ever encountered, or the truest example of “marketing in support of sales”.
In this world, Sales is Sales. Most Marketing departments are also Sales, and sometimes a company has “strategic initiatives” which are sometimes like Marketing departments. One of my hobbies is to ask employees of large components manufacturers about their Marketing departments… I always want to know what the department does… where to go to find the tangible work that is produced there. The conversation usually goes something like this:
employee: “Oh, they define products and do some research, and they do some collateral. They do technical marketing. “
me: “What is technical marketing?”
employee: “They support the product from a technical side – kind of like applications but they’re called marketing.”
And that’s usually where it ends.
The definition gets more predictable when I talk to an engineer - ”marketing places ads and it’s expensive”. Graduates to irate when I talk to salespeople – “marketing doesn’t do ANYTHING.”
So, at the end of the day I smile and keep plugging along. Repeating my simple goal under my breath. And I still wonder….
How do YOU market?
