How to Explain Marketing to Someone With No Background in Marketing

Every once in awhile, you'll find yourself having to explain marketing to someone who comes from a different discipline. Here's how I explain it. Feel free to forward this to a colleague who needs to quickly understand the basics.

Everyone knows something about marketing. But… pretty much everyone is wrong.

What most of us think we know about marketing is actually based on old episodes of Bewitched and Mad Men and maybe some Super Bowl ads.

Hardly any of that has anything with today or the future.

I’ll skip all the ad tech and mar tech jargon. Instead, I'll tell a simple story.

Imagine you want to buy a camera.

How do you decide which one to buy?

If it’s just about price and you want a decent point and shoot camera, you might just go to Amazon and see what they’ve got.

If you’re more serious, you’d Google for blogs and reviews — and you’d look carefully at reviews from people who’ve actually bought the camera brands you’re considering.

You’d probably also go ask friends on Facebook, especially the ones who talk about photography and post good pictures.

Along the way, algorithms learn that you’re looking for a camera and start serving you lots of ads.

Finally, you’d decide which camera to buy.

What I just described is what marketers call a “customer journey”.

People today mostly find out about stuff through search engines — including Amazon — and social media. This is the stuff marketing people call SEO/SEM (Search Engine Optimization/Search Engine Marketing), influencer marketing (people who are popular in social media), etc. This is why SEO and SEM are important, and why having a strong product or service with good reviews is important.

And that is why research, product strategy, and brand strategy are so important.

Product strategy is all about what we make and how well it fits customer needs. Good research helps us understand what customers say they need, but we have to remember that people often don’t know what they need until after you show it to them.

People often think about marketing as "communication", but remember that nothing in marketing communicates louder than product, service, and experience.

In the digital age, fundamentals matter more than ever.

Brand strategy is all about how we talk about our product or service, what playing field we define for ourselves, and how we act. This also helps inform Brand Experience, which is the total way consumers experience us.

But what about advertising?

Today, most of it is bought on exchanges — it’s bought and sold like stock. Basically, you’re betting on which prospect is most likely to become a paying customer. It’s a lot of math and science and it’s actually incredibly exciting.

What about creative? When do I get to meet Don Draper?

Well… there’s still a role for big splashy TV commercials, but it’s far less important than it used to be. The most important words about advertising today are “relevance, viewability, and data”.

“Creative” still matters, but not as much as the other stuff.

If you talk with marketing people, you’ll hear us talk a lot about analytics and attribution. Basically, we’re doing two things.

First, we're trying to figure out what happened — how did people hear about us, what made them consider us, what made them decide to buy? Second, we’re trying to figure out the relative influence of all the stuff we did.

Everything makes a contribution, but we’ll want to optimize our budget by spending the most on the stuff that works best.

And that pretty much covers the basics. Anybody can make it more complicated -- after all, as George Bernard Shaw put it, "All professions are conspiracies against the laity"-- but keeping it simple is the best way to get the fundamentals right.

About the author

Tom Cunniff (tom@brandevident.com) is a B2B brand strategy consultant who has worked with companies in Ad Tech, MarTech, Data, FinTech, BioTech and more. He has been quoted in books including Writing Without Bullshit and Artificial Intelligence for Marketing: Practical Applications. Tom has worked at J. Walter Thompson, founded and sold a successful early digital agency with clients including Unilever, spent 10 years leading global digital marketing as a client-side marketer, and wrote for the J. Peterman catalog in its Seinfeld-era heyday. He is former Chairman of the Digital Committee for the Association of National Advertisers.

Photo Credits (all Unsplash)

Whiteboard: Jonathan Velasquez; Camera: Esmee Holdijk; Analytics: Carlos Muza