Field of Marketing

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I sat down, ready to write down my thoughts on marketing. Thirty minutes later I could not come up with anything original. There is nothing which has not already been said by Mr. Philip Kotler. For those of you who do not know Philip Kotler, he is unofficially known as the “father of Marketing”, the first person to receive the “Leader in Marketing Thought” in 1975, and placed 4^th in the “Most Influential Business Writers/Management Gurus” category.  His book Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning, and Control is the most widely adopted book in business schools around the world today.

Marketing is both an art and a science. The science aspect of marketing (also called formulated marketing) is easy to grasp and most engineers who gravitate towards marketing tend to do well in this field. The artistic side of marketing requires a lot more creativity and takes a longer time to master. I have read almost every book written by Kotler accompanied by many other books on Marketing, and after four years in the field, I can say I have yet to feel 100% confident on the subject.

The average lifetime of a CMO or marketing executive is 18 months, which highlights the unpredictability of this job. Marketing is about increasing the perceived value of a product so that the buyer’s utility (perceived value – price a customer is willing to pay) is higher than the competitor’s product. This said, given the same quality, the buyer will purchase the product with the lowest price. It is part science, part art, and part a function of competitive landscape, which is a complex system dynamics model (competitive strategy, time delayed non-linear cause and effect relationship).

Buyer Decision process: The customer will choose product A over product B if (perceived value of product A – Price of A) > (perceived value of product B – price of B)

The job of marketing is to make sales irrelevant. People in Sales try to reduce the price to make the sale while Marketing is about increasing the price, therefore increasing the profitability of the product/company. Sales is transactional whereas Marketing is relational. Sales is about fulfilling need, whereas marketing is about creating need and increasing demand.

There is constant criticism about marketing and how it creates needs. However the book Principles of Marketing Management addresses this point well.  It suggests that needs are inherent to humans and cannot be influenced. Human  “wants” are something more closely tied to the product. Humans need food, but want a sandwich. Demand is something, which can be influenced by price and is about a specific product/brand. Customers demand subway sandwiches. This book argues that marketers’ influence wants and demands, but needs pre-exist marketing.

Marketing is one of the most versatile fields and I highly encourage and respect people pursuing it. But many people seem to be gravitating towards it with starry eyes and false hopes that it will be an easy field to conquer. I can promise you that this is not the case, marketing will end up being the toughest field you can choose as you grow into the leadership roles.

The reason Marketing is so complicated is because attributing the uplift in sales to a specific marketing campaign is not easy. At least not in the past, before the data driven marketing field gained traction. Also before the advent of Internet, it was much more difficult to directly correlate the influence of a marketing campaign to a specific sale. I will write a separate blog on attribution marketing later as it is a large field within itself.

Another reason why Marketing is difficult is because a lot depends on the product value proposition and competitive landscape. Your products’ competitive landscape will dictate how easy or hard it is to differentiate the product and the position it will take in peoples mind. If you recall from your undergraduate marketing classes, marketing is about 5Cs (Marketing Strategy) and 4Ps (marketing tactics). It is the STP analysis (Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning) which connects the strategy to the tactics. The process of anticipating needs and defining a product which will address those needs and positioning it in the market at a price point where buyers will see the value of your product over your competitors in this hyper competitive world is a very difficult task.  Most of the time, Marketing is brought in very late in the product life cycle, a few months before the product launch rather than from the very beginning of the product development process. By this time the product has already been defined and built and it is too late for marketing to conduct a customer feedback study and influence the product development. We as Marketers are asked to create a marketing campaign for a product, which might not have been completely validated, or value proposition hypothesis tested. Sales is looking to marketing to provide the leads, and senior executives are breathing down your neck for demonstrating the ROI (return on investment) on marketing spend, while also looking at the sales number to see the impact of marketing budget. This field is no child’s play.

There are two types of marketing roles prevalent in the Silicon Valley. Product Marketing and Field Marketing. Product Marketing is about communicating the product to the world (3 of the 4Ps – price, placement and promotion, while product management is about product features, 4^th P). As a Product Marketing Manager you are responsible for product launch including online marketing campaign. Field Marketing is about mostly outbound marketing including attending and publicizing at conferences, trade shows and events. It is about press release and building strategic partnerships. In my opinion Product Marketing is the toughest part of the job, but I am no expert and it depends on how the role is defined in a specific company. Most companies combine Field and Product Marketing into a single role, while others spilt them. The two roles should be divided but more on this later.