Is marketing more than a trick?

Image by jeffreylcohen via Flickr

I’m a bit hesitant about writing this post, and I took great care in crafting the headline, because I have had a bad experience writing about this subject in the past. But I think it’s too important not to talk about, because we live in a world where marketing has been reduced to nothing more than mere technique. A trick. And I think marketing can be a lot more than that. So, if you’ve been feeling more like a magician than a businessperson while doing your marketing, then maybe this is the post for you.

Sometimes it seems as if we all want to know what the “angle” is in Internet marketing. I once wrote a blog post on the Search Engine Guide Web site called “The All-Time Top-Secret Search Marketing Trick” and told everyone that there were no tricks. You have to do old-fashioned hardworking marketing of having what your customer wants and persuading them that you do.
Instead of people liking this column, I got several flaming comments about what a bad post it was, including one accusing me of faking a positive comment by writing it myself! They were infuriated that they had been lured into reading the post by the headline promising a trick and yet there was none revealed.
That’s how powerful this pull is to find the secret. The inside angle. The trick.
But what I hope to convince you of is that the trick is something very basic. The trick is truly valuing your customer. The trick is really trying to give them what they need–the right information to answer their questions, the right offer that fits their budgets, the right product that solves their problems.
And, somewhere, in the dim recesses of time, this is what marketing once was. Often we treat marketing as though it is mere promotion, when that is but one of the vaunted “Four Ps of Marketing.” We need to remember that the other three involve having what our customer wants, where they want it, and at the price they want it. Marketing is a lot more than trumpeting our wares.
And it doesn’t have to be about tricks. Marketing need not be about fooling people. If you really have what your customers want, you probably don’t need to fool them. Just tell them.

This entry was posted on June 16, 2010 at 6:02 pm and is filed under Internet Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.