Welcome to

The other day I mentioned a really thought-provoking article I had come across, but I couldn’t find the link at the time. Never fear, I found it. Check out: Stop Perfuming the Pig: Why “real” marketing is done before the product is created.

The overall theme is that marketers tend to overlook the Product part of the 4 P’s, focusing too often instead on Promotion. Consider this excerpt:

Peter Drucker makes it clear that marketing isn’t a product promotion strategy; it’s a product definition strategy, that “marketing” is creating a product that sells itself, creating a product that people want to buy; creating an environment that encourages people to buy.

Over the years however, industries and agencies and marketing experts have worn away the original meaning of marketing and cheapened it. Marketing now means many things to many people but apparently not what Drucker meant. For most people nowadays, marketing means t-shirts, coffee mugs, trinkets, trade show trash, and tchotchkes.

I attend many marketing conferences and invariably find that I’m the only one in attendance who seems to be talking about products; everyone else is talking about promotion. At one such marketing conference, an attendee in the front row asked every single speaker, “How does what you’ve talked about generate awareness and leads?” He didn’t know what to ask me because I hadn’t once used any of the marketing keywords: awareness, leads, campaigns, programs, spin, or buzz. Apparently to him I was a product guy and not a marketing guy. But promotion isn’t marketing.

Read the article, makes you think.