Introduction

I think we need to come up with a new word for what we do when we research what our customers need and try to meet those needs. This is marketing but the word has been so misused and used to describe the most incompetent efforts, mainly of large corporations which failed in their efforts to become market driven.

Marketing is not a sales tool. Selling and marketing are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Selling is persuading potential customers to buy your product. Marketing is making a product which potential customers will want to buy. You can't do both but, if a company fails at designing a product which anyone wants to buy, they often switch to selling - trying to persuade people to buy it anyway. This is then still called marketing and it has given marketing a bad name.

Next, companies think they should be doing marketing and get the bright idea to call what used to be their advertising department their marketing department. Advertising is annoying enough but it becomes even more irritating when it is referred to as marketing. The executives get to go around saying things like, "Yeah, we're getting a lot of synergy from our new marketing orientation." Another black eye for marketing.

Finally, companies which have functional marketing departments isolate them from product development so that they come up with ridiculous product ideas. Finding out what the potential customer wants is a two-way process where the customer also finds out what is possible. If the feed-back from product development is missing, the marketing department makes itself irrelevant by asking for things which can't be built.

The reason this is at all important for small businesses is that marketing can be made to work more easily in a small business environment that in a large corporation. Being able to market effectively becomes a competitive advantage for small businesses. That's why this section is second, right after the business is started.