I had a college professor who railed against marketing. He really hated it with a fiery passion. (I still managed to get an A from him in his class!) The reason he had such a disdain for marketing was that he felt it brainwashed people. It made things that were non-essential in life to be thought of as essential by the masses. The example he would give is deodorant. "For centuries,” he would lecture us, "people have not used deodorant and they seemed to be able to live with each other just fine. Someone marketed perfume that you rub in to your armpits and all of the sudden it is considered essential for good hygiene!” You might have guessed, he did not wear deodorant… and no one sat in the front row of his class either.

Before we toss my old professor over the too-much-of-a-nut-to-hold-a-real-job cliff, let me just say, he has a point. In marketing, our job is to persuade people that they really need a product or a service. Most of the things we market are non-essential. Let’s take a look at business in particular. I often am asked if something like social networking is essential to business today. Pick your point in history and you will find that there were essential components that are now obsolete. If you were in business 200 years ago, you needed reliable transportation to move your goods, which typically involved an equine animal of some sort and a wagon. If you were a horse breeder, you were supplying an essential to the business supply line. Turn the dial forward another 100 years and you needed a telegraph office near your place of business in order to make a connection with your out-of-town suppliers. If you ran the local telegraph office, you were integral to the economy. Go forward another 50 years and you needed a typewriter and carbon paper to make copies of important documents. If you sold carbon paper, you were a key to making the wheels of commerce turn. Of course, all of those things became obsolete at some point along the way. The reason they became useless to business is that something else came along and took their place. The internal combustion engine replaced the horse and wagon. The telephone took the place of the telegraph. The office copier took the place of carbon paper. And before any of these new things could become the new essential, there had to be marketing. Before that point, they were considered non-essential. In fact, many of the essentials were invented long before they became entrenched in business. It took marketing to create an awareness of their existence and the features that ingrained them as an essential.

You could say that the true essential in our free market system is marketing. It baffles me when otherwise smart business leaders try to convince me that they can do quite well without marketing. The answer to getting more sales is not to cut out your marketing efforts. If you do so, you have severed the tie between your business and an essential component for sales. I was at a rather large networking meeting. This particular meeting had been sponsored by a bank and its president offered a few words at the beginning of the meeting. He touted the strength of his bank and its growth despite hard economic times. He then claimed that all of the growth had happened without spending one penny on marketing! I thought, what kind of fools do you take us all to be? We are sitting at an event that your bank paid to sponsor, with your logo on the signage and print materials for this event and you are trying to convince me that you have not spent any money on marketing? It was a very short-sighted comment. Of course he had marketed his bank, and not only at this event. The growth of his bank had been a carefully thought out marketing plan targeted to a specific demographic. If you expect your product or service to make the leap from the non-essential to essential, you have to have marketing like a living body needs a beating heart.

What are the components of essential marketing? First, you have to make the market aware of your product in a way that is easy to understand. This is where good branding comes into play. If you have a complex gadget or service you are selling, you have to dumb it down so everyone gets it. An example of this would be a fuel injection system on an automobile. Let’s say we have called it a Step-n-Go System. If I do a good job of awareness marketing, everyone buying a car should have heard of a Step-n-Go System. Do I need to understand the difference between carburation vs. fuel injection engineering to purchase a car with such a system? No, I just need to know it makes the car go fast when I push down on the gas pedal. Secondly, I need to give the customer a compelling reason to buy my product. What need does it meet? What problem does it solve? Why is it better than other products like it? Thirdly, how do I keep the customer coming back to me for continued sales? How can I make the product better? How can I improve the service? Is there a way I can sell additional products and services to enhance the initial purchase? This needs to be communicated to your customers if you want to embed your product or services with them for the long haul.

Take a look at the products and services you purchase that have become essential to you. Try this marketing exercise. Trace the marketing path you were taken down to make your initial purchase. How much time transpired between becoming first aware of the product until you bought it for the first time? Can you also remember the subsequent purchases you made that have made this essential to the way you operate? Key to all of this is good marketing… or brainwashing of society, as my old, B.O.-laden professor would call it. Either way, marketing is essential.

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Original photo by David Freund