In some ways it’s amazing that marketing is such a little understood skill. I for one am grateful that it is, but there are drawbacks to it.
Marketing is what makes the world go around. Without it nothing is sold, without an army of face to face sales people or tele-marketers. Endless pounding of pavement, calling on customers, or sitting in bricks and mortar stores hoping the right customers happen to come in.
Without marketing, every business would not be able to employ the number of people they do sd more of their costs would be associated with the cost of selling the goods leaving smaller margins, less production, smaller business and lower profits.
With marketing we gain the power to do more with less.
We don’t need to rely on hand outs.
To me there is almost nothing more irritating than businesses that have sprung up to take advantage of some scheme – like the insulation industry during the last Labour government did. That business wouldn’t have existed without government subsidies – and technically it only has one customer – The Government because nobody else was giving them a substantial amount of money if any at all.
Those are not businesses, they are ‘arbitrage’ opportunities. Arbitrage is a trading term – to take advantage of market inefficiencies while they are there. So yes, taking advantage of them makes sense – but the ‘industry’ crumbles the moment that the incentive is withdrawn or the inefficiency is taken away.
It’s not hard to sell, “do you want free insulation?”
We marketers have a far harder challenge – how do we sell our products and services to the end customer so that we make a decent profit at the end of the day.
To me there is something pure, almost beautiful about it. We are making ourselves and our customers richer in the process. They have had their problem solved, their itch scratched or whatever metaphor you choose to use. They are richer from having brought from us.
This is what the marketer does for a business – they enrich lives, both customers and also the lives of the people in their business.
The world becomes a better place and sadly this selling and marketing thing seems to be a dying art right when we need it the most.
It’s the marketer who can succeed. They can grow businesses and they can make the ordinary seem extraordinary.
I am grateful to be a marketer, I hope you are too.