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The end of marketing

March 5, 2010 07:50 by author

You can't generate profit without generating revenue first, and you can't generate revenue without sales. In business, everything is about selling.

The more I look at it, the more the whole idea of marketing seems loony. I would be much more comfortable if marketing were redefined as a sales support activity. OK, it's fair to ask: What about demand creation? Isn't demand creation an essential part of marketing?

Demand creation is an essential part of the business process. But that doesn't mean it has to be part of the marketing process. Demand creation should be a subset of the sales function, and it should be called precisely that: Demand Creation.

Here's a simple model that any business can follow:

R&D => Product Development => Demand Creation => Sales => Fulfillment => Customer Service

End of story. End of marketing. Voila!

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Tags: demand creation, product development, customer service, R&D, sales, fulfillment, marketing
Categories: General
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Many to Many MarketingFor a very long time -- basically between the invention of fire and the development of radio network...Why wear your B2C hat when doing B2B marketing?My friend Ruth Stevens wrote a great post for her new blog on the Harvard Business Review web site. ...Comments better than original post!Hey, I'm the first to admit when I'm in over my head. The comments I received on my post, "The End o...

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March 11. 2010 21:52

Hey Mike--

I really like your content--seems common sense and very "telling truth to power" but I don't think the blogging format has as much visual interest as it might. I think the straight across look of the text needs to be broken up with more pictures or varied with more text blocks or maybe some sore of reference bar or something.

Sherry Toplyn

March 11. 2010 21:52

beg to differ, mike

Marketing 101:  find a need and fill it , 5 P's of marketing (price, product, promotion, etc.)
Marketing 102: branding , differentiate yourself from competition
Marketing 103:  once you have a brand and positioning that resonates, sell the hell out of it!!!

So, my friend, sales is down the chain.  You can say marketing is a subset of sales, but it ain't so.

(by the way, I'm in your social media marketing class...cool blog)

rhonda hurwitz

March 13. 2010 06:59

Yeah, I have to challenge this POV -- not that I am a defensive marketer or anything. Marketing, by and large, is prone to making itself subservient to sales. But this is the sign of an immature enterprise. Indeed, roles should be reversed. Sales should be a channel under Marketing's leadership -- one of many. The one who creates the demand should rule the world. This will happen: Once Marketing learns to capitalize on the new tools of marketing technology to track, measure and predict, it will move into a more dominant role. That's already true in B2C. I expect it to be true in B2B within the next decade. Actually, my preferred solution is a VP of Sales and Marketing or a Chief Revenue Officer -- someone who owns it all.

Britton Manasco

March 13. 2010 21:40

Ah, shake the tree Mike, nicely done. Two rejoinders:

1. First, this is a debate about semantics. I think we could all agree with Michael Porter's old "value chain" in which there are five basic activities that lead to margin: inbound logistics, operations, outbound logistics, marketing/sales, and service. Those are irrefutable. We can argue about what we call each step and about which executive team should oversee what area, but all those steps exist in any business, from Apple to Walmart to an ice cream truck vendor. Marketing seems worthy of broader control than sales because it has a view on the entire marketplace -- including competitors, market entrants, substitutes, customers, and cultural trends that must guide the entire enterprise production flow. Apple didn't launch the iPad because it has good salespeople, but because it is building a market for a new tool.

In simplest terms, sales is a byproduct of effective marketing.

2. At the broadest macro level, beyond any single enterprise, you could argue that our entire culture is based on marketing. We buy products that we have no innate use for (brushes for teeth, sneakers for feet, diamonds for fingers) simply because a culture of marketing has told us we "need" these new tools. Because marketers are creating new demand for new products, in a way these leaders must guide the logistics of supplies, operations, sales and service. Marketing in this sense is "building a market," and companies do this all the time.

So in the most nuanced of terms, sales only exist because a vast organization has built a structure to create a new market.

It's all semantics, of course. Which reminds me: Shouldn't human resources be in charge of everything? ;)

Ben Kunz
Director, Strategic Planning
Mediassociates

Ben Kunz

March 13. 2010 22:38

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