
Backroom Confessions Of A Marketing Executive - misterchen
http://www.smallbusinesshub.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/1224/Backroom-Confessions-Of-A-Marketing-Executive.aspx
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ecuzzillo
Basically, my possibly buzzword-influenced perception is that since more
people listen to blogs and other highly grassroots, internet-based, relatively
honest (to the extent that they know anything) sources of information, classic
marketing has begun to wane in effectiveness, because marketing most of the
time is dishonest hot air, and no one blogs about that. So if you're a
marketing executive, this should not be very consoling, since it means that
your reason for existence is beginning to disappear.

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bhalligan
Well, I think that your reason for existence still persists, but the methods
for achieving that existence have changed. The internet has made all markets
more "efficient," so that marketing executives need to figure out better ways
to let people shopping for their product/service discover them through search
engines, blogs, etc. ...The good news for a startup is that you do not need to
have a huge distribution organization to find potential customers in this day
and age if you can get good at "modern" marketing techniques.

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ecuzzillo
Markets being more efficient means that customers know better what is actually
going on, and marketroids have less influence over their perceptions. Sure,
there are still horrid inefficiencies, like the 1000% markup on eyeglasses,
but 19dollarglasses.com and the like has begun to close that inefficiency. It
isn't that marketing has changed media, like the expansion into TV advertising
from radio and paper; it's that marketing fundamentally is waning in
effectiveness as people have more ways of communicating honestly as people,
rather than as marketing departments.

As a result, the startup looking for potential customers not only doesn't need
a huge distribution organization, it doesn't even need to get good at "modern
marketing techniques," since most successfully marketed products, particularly
on the internet, have succeeded because they were better, not because they
used hip new marketing techniques. Even PR is ineffective at penetrating
actual blogs, although it still has an effect on old-style newspapers that
have been webified.

