At dinner this evening with some friends, the question of how to define the function of a marketing department came up. I related a story from the 1990s. A (very profitable) division of Hewlett-Packard asked for assistance with building an online community for several hundred marketing employees who wanted to share documents. “Most of these are PowerPoints,” it was explained to me. I was proud of being a quick study and said “Oh, I get it. People trade these PowerPoint presentations back and forth and then, when the final version is approved you want it to be accessible to customers from the server.” Everyone in the conference room blanched with horror. “We would never allow customers to see these presentations,” they exclaimed, “they are only for internal use.”
I thought for a moment and then asked “You mean that you pay several hundred people to sit in their cubicles and create PowerPoint presentations to show to each other?” The answer turned out to be “yes”.
So that’s my definition of marketing: A group of employees paid to show PowerPoint presentations to each other.
Just look at our ads. Don’t look behind the curtain at the little man…
Surely you know of the examples of clever marketing in “Predictably Irrational”.
This would hold true to many departments of large companies.
As one of my bosses said to me, while we were on a conference call with a client: “Can you imagine what their gross margins are like if they can waste time on a call like this?”
… and useless power point presesntations are exactly what you get when you have a bunch of semi literate high school graduates who spend four years in college getting drunk take a “marketing” job.
Real marketing professionals ( a very rare individual) are very effective in communicating an extrememly simple idea to the customer.. that the product / service is essential, to the customers very existence if possible.
This reminds of a great Gordon Gekko quote from “Wall Street”:
“One thing I do know is that our paper company lost 110 million dollars last year, and I’ll bet that half of that was spent in all the paperwork going back and forth between all these vice presidents”
Same principle, different era. I guess some things never change.
Actually, as an engineer, proper marketing work is very interesting. The process of discovering a market, identifying customers, investigating their needs, defining a product, then effectively promoting it involves lots of analysis, experiments, and measurements.
Sadly, few companies do proper marketing. Instead they equate marketing with sales or adverting.