Is marketing all about campaigns?

Marketing is not all about campaigns. 
That is only a tiny bit of what constitutes the Marketing concept and it is becoming an increasingly tiny bit as each month goes by. 
With some notable exceptions, advertising, for example, is increasingly not working. It is costly, it’s audiences are fragmented and, over the years, it has painted itself into a corner where its target audiences are increasingly cynical and intolerant of much of it.
PR is suffering a similar fate – it lacks credibility as a communications medium and, to be honest, it is a long time since I have seen or heard of a PR agency that is doing, or has done, an outstanding job for their clients (much less an outstanding job for their clients that has also delivered real benefit to their clients’ customers).
Sales Promotion isn’t doing any better – it is simply a way of achieving sales growth (or arresting sales decline) by giving something away. And much of what is given away has about as much perceived value by the customer as a few sheets of toilet paper.
Product Sampling? Well, it might work for some new FMCG products in supermarkets but it is limited.
Telemarketing? Hello?
Trade fairs? Usually just reps trying to sell to other reps until they find out that they are reps too so, at best, invite them for a beer back at the hotel that evening ‘cos you’re not going to achieve anything more worthwhile than that.
Networking? Similar characteristics to Trade Shows – usually comprises poorly organised events that are full of reps who, of course, can’t really sell to each other. And the wine is usually cheap, warm and disgusting and the presentations all too overtly trying to flog stuff.
Literature/Collateral? Expensive and increasingly irrelevant. 
Face to Face Selling? In a retail environment, since the rapid trend to commission-only earnings gathered momentum, this is typically a bloody dreadful experience from the customer’s perspective.
And in B2B selling, we are still overrun by poorly recruited, poorly trained and poorly managed sales people who do little more than append the letters “tile” to the word “rep” through a whole bunch of dodgy or iffy behaviours designed to do nothing other than nail your wallet to the wall as soon as is humanly possible.
So if Marketing is not about campaigns, what is it about?
Some say it is about arresting the human intelligence for long enough to extract money from it. No it’s not. That’s mugging. And, sadly, it goes on throughout the developed world on a daily basis.
Others think Marketing is that place where the ads are done. Well, if Marketing were only about campaigns then that might be close to the truth. But it’s not. So it’s not.
Some cynics say it’s just sales with a college degree. If that were true, the marketing profession would be populated by people with a far higher IQ than it seems to be these days. 
Given its vital role at the centre of the business universe, one would hope that marketing practitioners would be highly trained, highly qualified, very bright cookies. But, largely, they are not. Today, they seem to range from self proclaimed gurus at one end of the spectrum through to over promoted blonde secretaries (who once organised a good Christmas Party and got rewarded with a promotion to the role of marketing executive) at the other end of the spectrum and a whole variety of ‘interesting’ individuals in between.
As economies become tougher, markets become increasingly fragmented, innovation accelerates at an incredible pace and survival can no longer simply be taken for granted, it is now more important than ever that the marketing concept is fully understood and effectively deployed – after all, without it a business is nothing.
The definition of the Marketing concept says that: “An organisation will only achieve its goals by identifying and/or creating needs and/or wants amongst its chosen target markets and fulfilling them at a profit time after time after time”.
Contemplate this for a few minutes and you will come to realise that this also articulates the business concept pretty accurately. After all, there is only one place the money comes from so if a business is not orientating its very existence towards that source, then what is it doing?
It is about everything that a business is, thinks, says and does. And that means so much more than campaigns.
I find myself asking this question on an almost daily basis as I encounter or observe businesses of every conceivable size, shape and colour who clearly don’t have the foggiest idea what the Marketing concept is.
And if the Marketing concept is not understood, then there is not going to be a marketing “state of mind” permeating the organisation. This means that a whole bunch of other perspectives (other than a marketing perspective) will dominate the organisation’s thinking, attitudes and behaviours.
And that isn’t good. It isn’t good because research has identified that businesses that are market oriented consistently outperform others in their sector on a wide range of key business performance criteria.
That matters more now (and will do in the future) than it has ever done before.
And all of that means that Marketing is, and needs to be, about so much more than campaigns.
Brian Meredith is CEO of The Marketing Bureau. Email [email protected]