Week 1: What is Marketing

I graduated with MS and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering and have been working in R&D at a wireless telecommunications company since then. My company was found in 1975 by five engineers and it had managed by engineers. When I joined the company five years ago, the company had 35 employees, most of which are engineers and technicians. Although the company had a marketing department, there were only few people in the marketing department and the focus was on sales and customer services. The company’s marketing was driven by engineering, and the products were engineered based on the customers’ specific demands. The major role of marketing was only to advertise and sell products and provide supports to customers. And that how I saw what marketing in a technology company was.

Glancing at the “Marketing Myopia” article summary, I started to realize that there is more in marketing than what I experienced at the company. Myth 4 in the article caught my first attention. Organizing the company around the technology is pretty close to what my company had been doing. So what really is marketing? I asked myself and found that what I knew about marketing was very limited.

So my objective for the first week is to better understand what marketing is. I studied Chapter 1 of the marketing plan handbook, read the marketing myopia article, and then reviewed the videos by Jeff Bezos and by Professor Talbott.

The main point I have learned from the materials is that marketing planning is a cyclical process that consistently focuses on consumer benefits. Focusing on consumer benefits means that the purpose of a business is to serve the consumer, not to make products! Being a cyclical process means that no marketing is ever really final. As the customer needs change over time, we need to learn, adjust, and do new things consistently to ensure that the marketing plan serves the customer needs.

Another key learning point that opens my perspective of marketing is that satisfying customer needs drives the products, not the other way around. The key to business success is to define the business around the customer needs (not the products) and focus on meeting customer needs rather than selling products. This way of thinking helps me understand my company’s business better. We produce data radios, but our business is really telecommunications. What customers need is communication path between their applications. Any mean of telecommunications (e.g. cellular, satellite, optical communications) would be in the same business.