
What is Marketing? - jheitzeb
http://www.scottporad.com/2010/05/26/what-is-marketing/
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daveschappell
As I stated in the comments to your blog post, I think your definition of
marketing is extremely wrong -- what you're describing is advertising (or,
more importantly, performance-driven or metrics-driven advertising).

Continuing to perpetuate the idea that marketing and advertising are the same
thing is pretty uninformed.

It's like calling a systems engineer and a front-end web developer the same
thing -- they're both engineering, right?

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daryn
They're related, so until you have different people to fill each role, yes,
they're the same thing.

(The marketing person will own advertising, and the SE will own web-dev)

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dkokelley
The marketing definition is a bit weak. Analyzing the market and determining
who will pay and ways to make the market aware of the product are certainly
major aspects of marketing, but they don't provide the entire picture.
Interestingly enough, new product development is a huge function of marketing.
Most engineers don't like to think of themselves as marketers (at least I
assume so), but in fact much of what they do is a function of marketing.

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scottporad
It's fascinating that the common response between these comments and those on
the blog basically boil down to "product development is marketing too" and
"every activity with the customer is marketing".

If that's the case, then let's throw out the word marketing and talk about the
real issue because debating what that word means misses the point.

At some point, after your developers have built your shiznit you have to find
some customers. You have to take your widget and get it in front of a person
who will pay for it. You have to get customers.

Call this marketing, call it sales, call it advertising...call it whatever the
heck you want to call it. The point is...it's not easy. All of us jerks in
product development think that the idiots in marketing just spend money and
ads and the magic happens, but it's not so simple.

We could sit around the campfire for hours and tell stories of great products
that didn't make it because they couldn't get enough customers. Because there
was a failure of the <insert what you want to call it here>.

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rmorrison
_At some point, after your developers have built your shiznit you have to find
some customers. You have to take your widget and get it in front of a person
who will pay for it. You have to get customers._

This is what my startup, eggzack.com, is trying to do for small businesses.
Small businesses are similar to tech startups, run by hard-working
entrepreneurs trying to fit a market need. However, most small business owners
don't understand how to market themselves using it, which is where we come in.

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jheitzeb
Check out this framework:
[http://www.pragmaticmarketing.com/pdf/PragmaticMarketingFram...](http://www.pragmaticmarketing.com/pdf/PragmaticMarketingFramework.pdf)

When i first saw this it made hiring and sorting out non-tech jobs much
clearer in my mind. Though i wish there was a version of this for consumer
Internet type companies.

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ig0rskee
William Davidow's (of Intel) definition is as true as ever:

"Marketing must invent complete products and drive them to commanding
positions in defendable market segments"

If you subscribe to this vision, things like advertising, promotions and
product development become easy to align.

