Peruse the Marketing section of your local bookstore and you’ll see a lot of titles and some unusual pairings. Guerrilla Marketing, Punk Marketing, Pyro Marketing…the list goes on.
These are not bad books and if they were I wouldn’t say so, at least not now, as this post is not intended to be a review. I merely hope to assuage your marketing dilemma.
The problem with the above titles and the apparent surplus of marketing styles available to us is that they confuse something that is very very simple. They also imply that perhaps there is some hidden technique for marketing that only a punk or pyromaniac knows.
Take Biff. Biff is starting a new business (a banana stand he intends to run with his cousin) and wends his way into his local Barnes & Noble. He looks at the titles and thinks to himself, “Well, jeez. I’m not a punk so I don’t think I need to learn to market like a punk. And I’m certainly not a pyro, except for that one incident back in grade school. And guerrilla? Do I have to wear camo for that? Probably…I’m out.”
Biff gets confused and takes off. He decides he’ll just figure it all out on his own. And probably he will because Biff knows deep down that marketing is simply telling people what he’s selling.
The Backbone of Marketing
Marketing is nothing more than finding a communication line from you to your consumer and putting your product on it. That’s all it is. You can call it whatever you want: punk, pyro, elephantiasis or Aunt Jemima’s Christmas Basket, but marketing breaks down to the simple actions of:
- Have a product
- Find someone to tell
- Find a way to tell them
- Tell them
That’s marketing.
Whether you do that via TV, radio, magazine ads, internet banners or street-corner evangelism, you’re finding a communication line and putting your product on it. You can do it with a loudspeaker, by dropping turkeys out of an airplane or setting shit on fire. You can do it aggressively, loudly, expensively or all for free. How you choose to market is up to you, but without a communication line and someone receiving at the other end of it, you’re not marketing.
A Simple Real-Life Example
There’s a knock on my door, and I answer it.
On the stoop is a little girl. She’s wearing a Girl Scout uniform and she’s got a little red wagon piled high with boxes of cookies.
She says to me, “Do you want to buy some cookies?”
That’s marketing.
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