MKT-Business and Geeks
I will share some facts about MKT I’m learning or maybe just getting into awareness along with some reflections on this subject. I’m reading my second marketing book Godin’s All Marketers Are Liars and there are a lot of thoughts that come and go while following the ideas shared in this book.
For some years I’ve believed that a lot of business knowledge is just about common sense and a great ability of observation every-day-phenomena. The experience of studying MKT or business is very different from that of studying a new language or physics. So why to study and to work on these subjects is a worth activity? Because of the method and the analysis.
Let us take as a fact that in some point of your life you have realized all –or at least the majority– of the concepts and relationships that are involved in business and marketing. But nonetheless, if you are not involved in business studies you have never organized them, prioritize them and ordered them to reach a concrete goal.
Knowledge without analysis is more about beliefs than about techniques and efficiency. And it seems to be obvius that a business needs efficiency, revenue, profit.
I have been involved in very technical and, if you want, scientific activities since my University studies. I know what mathematicians, scientists and computer-geeks think and say about both business people and subject. Ok, I can’t disagree that the concepts when analized and presented in a classroom or a book seem to be, by far, much more evident than those they studied and work with every day. I think that fact is the starting point of all the misunderstandings and subestimation pure-technical people have about business people (later I will post about the subestimation in the opposite direction).
The very detail that techies don’t see about professional business activities is that in the every-day operation there are thousands and thousands of different decisions about what to do next, and each of them could have different consequences –some of them the opposite to another. The ability to make the right decision (or at least not the wrong one) requires, besides a natural talent, a lot of knowledge about all the variables that are in game.
In marketing the horizon is very similar. There are millions of ways you could try to spread an idea or a story. When you read a book or attend a masterclass about this subject, all the ideas seem to be obvius, but to choose those ideas among millions is not trivial. And to choose how to perform a succesful marketing campaign among all the posibilities is quite different from an easy task.
There is a guy that was a developer when young, after a while he founded a company and he understood these ideas and changed his mind. Here I copy some of his thoughts that he shares while reviewing Moore’s Crossing the Chasm (my first MKT/Sales reading):
Back in my callow youth as a software developer, I knew only two things about marketing people:
1. They produced random, incoherent changes to the schedule and feature set, justified by hand waving about “the market window”. That made me feel annoyed.
2. They had to wear more expensive clothes at work, while getting paid less money to buy them with. That made me feel smug.Other than that, they were irrelevant to my life. Except that they weren’t, not really. Until I started my own company, I never worked at a place that made a profit. And that was due to the fact that both marketing and development were clueless about marketing. (In the absence of strong marketing, development confidently steps in and makes a hash of things.)
Any common place among my techie fellows?
But more than just saying that marketing is important and not trivial, I have to state here that it’s also a very creative activity. It’s not just about observing and realize what is happen out there. There is also a lot of space for the creativity to be expressed. In following posts I will share some creative thoughts from some great marketers and also some clever visions of our reality in this market-ruled world.
