It’s All Marketing

Coming from an engineering background, I’m not at all that enthusiastic about the tedium of marketing. Since I’m not too sure where marketing, advertising and sales intersect, I find myself wanting to call the whole field ‘marketing’. I understand that others will find it a rewarding career and mentally stimulating.

At one end, marketing is based on research into what customers might want or where there are real needs in society waiting for a practical solution. At the another end are the ads, carefully crafted with technical excellence, designed to engage a customer in a promise. At another end – I don’t see it as linear – someone has to go out and interact with people to make a sale, to close a deal or to make a convert.

This probably sounds terribly obvious, but then think about it in terms of; a religious or charitable organization pursuing its membership goals, a political candidate trying to get elected, an academic institution trying to compete for the best students to enroll. And perhaps more specifically, what about one’s career development where it’s important to get the powers that be, the next boss or even the current boss, to understand the value of one’s contributions. Throw in kick starter campaigns, space programs, medical research initiatives and without marketing they just don’t happen.

The internet has made a web presence for any cause almost mandatory – it’s basic marketing. The good news is that in our field of endeavor we get to build platforms for just that, marketing, in this general sense.