Marketing is about satisfying needs profitably.

The market has changed dramatically this year. It is gratifying to see that many companies have really seized the opportunity and made great progress. It is also sad to see that more companies have been led into the ditch of "traffic is king" and the ditch of many concocted new concepts.

There is no business that is free from setbacks. What makes me sad is that if our company had a basic understanding of marketing, it would not have to fall into these pitfalls. If it still falls into misunderstandings about "marketing", it may never get out of it.

This previously posted article is what the editor considers to be the most important one since the account was founded. In the future, I will make some adjustments and repost it several times based on the situation, so that more people can have the minimum correct understanding of marketing.

Our communication efficiency will be greatly improved and we will have to avoid many pitfalls.

1. There are two subjects in the world that are most misunderstood

One is called accounting. In the public's understanding, accountant is "bookkeeping", and in many companies, the greatest value of accounting is "cooking books".

Many people don’t understand why a “bookkeeper” needs to take the “Certified Public Accountant” exam, which is said to be extremely difficult to pass.

The good thing is that with the active capital market in recent years, people's understanding of accountants and accounting firms has greatly improved. They know their importance in regulating business operations and that they are also called "economic police." Especially those companies seeking to go public and seek capital entry must take a good "accounting lesson."

What is even more misunderstood is "marketing". At least accountants know that they are far more than just "bookkeepers". The capitalists at the top of the current business contempt chain understand that accounting is far more than just "bookkeeping".

The tragedy of marketing is that most business owners think that marketing is “selling products”, and even most people who do marketing think that they are “salesmen”.

• I have a comb and you have a monk, and we hit it off right away. This is "good marketing."
• No matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it can be sold, it is a good cat.
• As long as your thinking does not slip, there are always more solutions than problems.
• There are no unsaleable goods in the world, only people who cannot sell them.
• …

2. Five major schools of marketing

Based on this logic, China's marketing is basically divided into five major schools.

1. Idea Pie

The first type is the idea school, which claims to be able to "pierce the sky with a single needle" and turn stone into gold.

The same thing can be described in a different way, or given a name, or a brilliant slogan, or a different "positioning", and immediately turned from decay into magic.

Of course, Dianzipai must have a huge amount of advertising support.

2. Hype

The second type is called the hype faction, which is euphemistically called creating momentum, but is actually an upgraded version of the idea faction.

Create concepts, create anxiety, create hot spots, and even create the illusion of hot sales, fabricate celebrities and fabricate facts.

The propaganda methods used by the hype faction have also become more diverse.

3. Relationship-based

The third type is called the relationship faction, and the most murderous word in this faction is “get it done.”

The ways to get things done may be relationships, drinking, kickbacks, a "gift", or a beauty trap, all of which are called "customer relations".

Of course, the most common situation is that one “can’t handle it” but pretends to “handle it”, fooling around or “integrating resources”, and maybe one can really fool people; if one is caught, just find another buyer and continue to “handle it”.

4. Chicken Blood Pie

Find a large group of salespeople and give them dreams: "To be successful you must first go crazy and charge forward with a simple mind."

Let them fight for their dreams and dare to "show their swords", so as to push their products to the market or to dealers with the lowest labor costs.

5. Systematic

The fifth type is called the system faction, which is actually an extension of the chicken blood faction.

Under the banner of "marketing is a system", they use various regulations to constrain sales staff, ultimately to make it easier for bosses to control sales staff; when used in combination with "chicken blood", the efficacy of the drug is doubled.

The common feature of these five major factions is that "everything revolves around the deal". They are short, flat and fast, and it looks like they punch hard but the knife will make blood flow when it touches the flesh.

To be honest, these "marketing" schools have once achieved glory, otherwise they would not still have so many fans today and would still be the mainstream of "marketing" in the market; now many of them are dressed in the cloak of the Internet, the cloak of "platform" and the cloak of "traffic".

But the problem is that in the past decade, all the methods that were used to make the world go round have become ineffective.

Consumers seem to have become smarter, and the carefully designed conceptual designs are easily exposed; and today's young people also seem to have become smarter, and what they take in is chicken blood, but what comes out is often dog blood.

Is marketing failing?

Of course not, because these routine designs centered around "closing deals" should be part of marketing, and in most cases, they are not the most important part.

Once a company puts all its attention on these routines, it loses the original intention of marketing and goes in the opposite direction. In more serious cases, the company may go too far and become a fraudulent enterprise.

None of this is real marketing.

3. What is real marketing?

This matter is simple if you say it is simple, but it is also very complicated if you say it is complicated.

I have been in the marketing field for more than 20 years. I started out in sales and can explain what I do in one sentence.

Everything has been ruined since I switched to marketing. Until now, no one in my family can figure out what I do. In the early years, they were very worried: this guy doesn't drink, doesn't socialize, isn't sociable, has extremely low emotional intelligence, and is never afraid of offending people. Will he starve to death or get beaten to death doing marketing?

Don’t be in a hurry. There are many definitions of marketing. Let’s start with the simplest one: marketing is the profitable satisfaction of needs.

This is the simplest definition, isn’t it?

The core issue of marketing is "meeting needs" rather than "seeking transactions". The essence of marketing management is demand management rather than "sales target management".

Mr. Drucker’s most famous saying about marketing is: Marketing is to make selling unnecessary - this sentence does not mean to get rid of salespeople, nor is it to discredit sales work (the importance of sales is self-evident); rather, it means that if you do a good enough job of "meeting needs", transactions will happen very easily, and the sales costs required will be extremely low or even zero.

When you take "demand" as the core of marketing, your work focus and your thinking perspective will naturally be placed on "value creation", "target market", "brand communication", "positioning", "value transfer" and "value dissemination". This is real marketing.

When you regard "selling goods" as the core of marketing, you will naturally focus on investment promotion, hype, traffic, monetization, concept packaging, and customer relations; you may even resort to fraudulent sales, pyramid schemes, forced sales, bribery, and sex sales, which are all "fake marketing."

One is "sitting on the sky and looking at the well" (copyright belongs to Mr. Zeng Xiangwen), where value accumulates gradually and transactions are very easy to happen; the other is sitting on the well and looking at the sky, where all you see are sales targets, but in the end it is just illusions and nothing is gained.

After reading the simplest definition, let’s look at the social definition of marketing:

Marketing is a social process in which individuals and groups can obtain what they need by creating, providing and freely exchanging products and services with others; consumers and businesses jointly create and share value, which is the most important theme of modern marketing.

The significance of this definition lies in pointing out the core concept of marketing - value, and based on this core concept, marketing is divided into four major sections: discovering value, creating value, delivering value and communicating value.

If you are not a marketer, knowing the above two definitions is enough.

If you are a business owner, at least you won’t be like Feng Jing when Ma Liang and lead your business into trouble.

4. Definition of Marketing

But if you are a marketer or a boss who attaches great importance to marketing, you must understand the professional definition of marketing.

Because a professional definition can clearly define the subject and allow you to accurately identify its core elements, which is a prerequisite for knowing how to apply it accurately.

Marketing is the activity, system and process of creating, communicating, delivering and exchanging market offerings that are valuable to customers, clients, partners and society as a whole.

The professional definition of the inseparable concept of "marketing management" is as follows: Marketing management is the art and science of selecting target markets and acquiring, maintaining and increasing customers by creating, delivering and communicating excellent customer value.

These two are the definitions given by the American Marketing Association.

It is worth noting that the American Marketing Association previously defined marketing management as follows: Marketing management is the process of planning and executing the conceptualization, pricing, promotion, and distribution of goods, services, and ideas to create exchanges that meet individual and organizational goals.

Have you noticed the fundamental changes between the two?

The previous definition emphasized the process. Earlier versions of "Marketing Management" had a subtitle called "Analysis Planning Execution Control"; while today's definition emphasizes the direction: increasing customers and creating, delivering and disseminating value.

Once you understand the concise definition, social definition and professional definition of marketing, it will be easy to understand what marketing is, what needs to be done, and what are the basis and principles for doing it.

as follows:

• Core concept: value.
• Basic sections: discover value, create value, deliver value, and spread value.
• Basic process: R—STP—4P—I—C, starting with insight, planned with STP, implemented with 4P, carried out with execution, and then recycled with feedback.
• Basic concepts (18): need, desire, demand, market segmentation, target market, positioning, supply, brand, channel, media (paid, free, owned), impression, integration, expected value, satisfaction, supply chain, competition, marketing organization, marketing environment.
• Peripheral concepts (there are many, and their forms will continue to change): consumer portraits, product research and development, creativity, product concepts, services, advertising, packaging, logos, public relations, promotions, delivery, dealers, terminals, traffic, scenarios, promotions, interaction, after-sales, word of mouth, social networks, etc.

5. Marketing Concept

After all, even if you explain the professional marketing concepts clearly, it is just a matter of writing a table; but why do most people not understand it, and even many people in the industry are confused?

Part of the reason is of course the desire for quick success and instant benefits. Once they have something, they are eager to sell it for money and are not willing to consider the customer's value and needs.

I often hear confusing statements like "the market has no shortage of good products, but lacks good marketing." I come into contact with hundreds of companies every year, but only a few of them can truly be called good products. Most of them are "semi-finished products" or defective products (as said by Mr. Zhang Liwei) that talk to themselves, lack core values, and have unclear demands.

No one would think that their child is ugly. Of course, it should be true that “everyone loves their child, and flowers bloom when they see them.”

In order to cater to the needs of enterprises, many people often appear in the image of demigods, creating miracles, accomplishing the impossible, and selling combs to monks.

The easiest thing to happen is trying to take a shortcut and ending up falling into a ditch.

The word "marketing" is another culprit that has caused widespread misunderstanding of marketing and has caused misfortune to many companies and marketers.

We know that "銷" is a foreign word, a translation of "Marketing"; this may be the worst translation in the two hundred years of Chinese translation history, an absolute disaster.

"Marketing" is the progressive tense of the English word "Market", which means everything in the market, including market elements, market phenomena, operating laws, etc., with particular emphasis on dynamics.

Chinese does not have a progressive tense, which means that there is no completely accurate word corresponding to the word "Marketing" in Chinese. The closest ones are "marketing" or "marketing management".

For some reason, the original translator translated "Marketing" into "銷", which means "operation" and "sales".

There are two fatal mistakes here:

First, it does not reflect the core elements of "Marketing", "demand" and "value", but uses the words "operation" and "sales", which easily leads marketing to "sales orientation".

Sales are merely the transactional part of marketing. Once an enterprise conducts its market work entirely around transactions, it will definitely lose sight of the important and fall into the five major schools of thought I mentioned at the beginning, harming others, itself and the enterprise.

Secondly, the perspective of this translation is completely corporate. Whether it is operation or sales, it is all from a corporate perspective. This is precisely the taboo in marketing work. Marketing work emphasizes the customer perspective and market perspective the most.

If the perspective is wrong, a large number of fantasy-based companies and products will be born.

“If the name is not right, the words will not flow”, not to mention that the word “marketing” has been severely stigmatized, which has led to a lot of strange phenomena:

• Some people who are good at hype and creating concepts are called marketing masters. The marketing of masters is often associated with deception and deception, and marketers make people think of those who sell "dog skin plasters" and "power pills".
• Some exaggerated publicity and excessive packaging are actually called "over-marketing". Isn't this anti-marketing?
• Many companies try to avoid the word "marketing". Boss Duan Yongping, who is known for his marketing, said that his company attaches the most importance to products and not marketing.
• Dong Mingzhu, who started her career in marketing, said that her family relies on mastering core technologies, and the thing they are most resistant to is marketing.
• …

6. Correcting the name of “marketing”

Modern economics clearly includes "Marketing" in the category of applied economics. Kotler even said that "marketing is another name for behavioral economics."

If "accounting" is the "economic police", then "Marketing" is the most fundamental driving force for economic development, because it studies and applies the most basic thing in economics - demand.

The essence of Marketing management is demand management.

Without Marketing, enterprises will have no driving force for development and the economy will become a tree without roots. The most important reason for our sluggish domestic demand is the lack of “Marketing”.

Now we advocate "internal circulation", and the leading factor is still demand.

The backwardness of our economy is first and foremost due to the backwardness of "marketing" rather than the backwardness of technology; what is more difficult than making a chip is to create an application system for the chip in the market.

The industries where we lag behind are often not in purely high-tech fields, but in areas closely related to "marketing".

Semiconductors, large aircraft, aircraft carriers, aerospace, etc., although technological breakthroughs are difficult, we have seen that many of them are catching up, and some have already begun to take the lead; but in milk powder, cosmetics, luxury goods and even clothing and fast-moving consumer goods, we are always defeated miserably.

Uncle Deng once said that "science and technology are the primary productive forces", and in today's market economy environment, "Marketing is also the primary productive force."

"Marketing" is so important, but in the context of stigmatization and misinterpretation, the cultivation of talent echelons is also very worrying.

Dr. Wang Sai said that in a certain year, Fudan University's marketing major only enrolled four students.

Those top students couldn't stand the fact that with such excellent academic performance, they were actually studying a major that required them to sell goods.

According to Professor Jing Fengjie of East China University of Science and Technology and Professor He Jiaxun, the translator of the 15th edition of "Marketing Management", it is generally difficult for domestic universities and prestigious schools to recruit students for marketing majors, while marketing majors are popular in some ordinary and even second-tier and third-tier colleges.

The marketing profession has a lack of successors and its level is low, which is due to the misunderstanding of "marketing".

Marketing needs to be properly named, and Chinese "marketing" needs a vigorous enlightenment movement; many experts in the industry deeply resonate with this point. Last October, Mr. Kotler came to Beijing to hold a summit, which also brought a wave of "return of value marketing" to China.

But the real enlightenment of marketing requires the involvement of entrepreneurs and marketers who are personally involved.

Everything revolves around the social problems we can truly solve, everything revolves around meeting market demand, and everything revolves around the value that customers can perceive; we can avoid all the routines and pitfalls, see through all the quacks, bring a steady stream of real benefits to the company, and let marketers gain

Real value enhancement.

The correct name of "marketing" and the true enlightenment of marketing management are of immeasurable merit and achievement, and we wish to share this with all the readers.

Author: Miao Qingxian

Source: Lao Miao Si Marketing