The Job of Marketing

I, along with a group of my marketing colleagues, were asked this question 20 years ago during a rather humbling meeting. The way the meeting went from that point forward profoundly impacted the course of my career.

The San Jose-based startup we worked at had begun to struggle to ramp up revenues, and the VCs, of course, were getting concerned. Our marketing team was in Full Fire Drill Mode - plenty of action, little practical effect. The board decided to bring in a fellow named Steve Blank, who even at that time was a marketing expert of some renown in the Silicon Valley. Steve is now a recognized authority on startups, and perhaps he's mellowed a bit, but in 1994 he was a pretty intimidating figure, and we all felt our jobs were on the line. And so one day this soon-to-be-legend called the whole marketing team into the conference room and asked us a simple question: "What is the job of marketing?" There were some stutters, some requests for clarification, but Steve just put up his hand, repeated the question, and then asked each of us in turn for an answer.

Cool, no pressure, or anything...

And so each of us gave one answer or another, sometimes pulled from what we could remember of Phillip Kotler's writings, sometimes a valiant ad lib, but each with some palpable degree of lameness. When he had heard enough - sometime around the fourth or fifth answer as I recall - Steve held up his hand again and said, "Write this down" as he lifted his marker to the whiteboard:

It is the job of marketing to create demand among qualified prospects in the target market, and drive them to the appropriate sales channel.

He waited a moment as we furiously scribbled this into our notebooks (few laptops and no tablets at this stage, kids), and then said: "If whatever it is you're currently doing doesn't do that, stop doing it and come see me."

In this one moment, he crystallized the workaday goal for every marketing effort in the universe. Yes, there are strategic analyses to be done, and grand thoughts and aspirations to be explored and acted upon, but for a young practitioner of the Marketing Arts, there was no better advice I could have had. Note that each point of emphasis (underlined) in his dictum served to remind us of the purpose and approach for our work:

"create demand" - not simply spew information about your product, but to speak in terms of customer problems, needs, and desires. To start with THEIR perspective.

"qualified prospects" - your pipeline stays clean when marketing does its job of targeting and filtering appropriately. Don't make sales clean up after you.

“target market” – spend your money reaching people who might care. Coverage does not equal effectiveness.

“drive” – your job isn’t over once you get their attention. You must continue to compel them relentlessly towards engaging with your sales team, qualifying and weeding out as you go, so that sales gets an edible product.

appropriate sales channel – for companies with direct and indirect channels and/or segmented products and prices, don’t shuffle them around later.

Thanks again, Steve, it was one of the most useful, if terrifying, 30 minutes of my career.