Marketing Bisnis

Why is “technology marketing” such an oxymoron? Why is it always right there with Vatican City Planned Parenthood and Mormon Wine Country and government intelligence?
What’s most galling about such self-cancellation is how often the people in charge of marketing are the enablers of it.
In my experience there are two reasons for it. You must incorporate this understanding into the way you solve the problem at your company.
The first has to do with a definition. Specifically, lack of consensus definition of the marketing function inside so many product-obsessed companies. A definition everyone’s signed up for, believes in and rallies around.
I could walk into just about any company within a 20 mile radius of my office in Silicon Valley and ask people at random to give me a one-sentence description of the various functional departments. They would tell me that sales closes the deals, engineering delivers the product, manufacturing makes it, finance counts the beans, and that HR handles benefits, insurance, recruiting and lawsuits. And throws parties people complain about.
What about marketing?
Ask you shall receive a menu of engineering-support projects and sales-support programs or a mish-mash of convoluted, sometimes indecipherable yammering about logos, literature, trademarks and tradeshows. And these would be the definitions thrown at you by marketing people.
Ask people from other departments and you could get anything from playfully disparaging wisecracks to outright hostility. Especially if it’s a salesperson who didn’t make his or her number the previous quarter.
Lack of a consensus definition is a big problem because organizations, like nature, hate vacuums. So, with no consensus definition, people start defining you. And now you’ve got big problem that’s getting bigger. When someone else is defining your job, it’s lose-lose: You get the blame for the screw-ups, someone else gets credit for success. Every time.
The second reason is the prevalence of what I call the Inside-Out Syndrome.
A company begins life by finding a need and filling it. This is classic outside-in thinking and executing. The outside-in perspective is essential to effective marketing. The problem is that over time, as the company grows it is victimized by its own success. And the natural instinct, what I call the marketing gene that equips you with an outside-in perspective, steadily gives way to a perspective that’s inside-out. More and more, you start seeing the world through the lens of your product and your company.
Before you know it, fewer and fewer people inside the company share the customer perspective. Left unchecked, this leads to all kinds of problems for which marketing typically catches the heat: The company wonders why customers aren’t buying the products that the company insists on selling to them. Small wonder why.
There’s only one remedy. Start pushing that gravitational center back to the customer, where it belongs, and where it began when your company started up. This pushing back begins at the top of the organization. Get back into orbit around your customers. Expect them to revolve around you and you’ll be amazed how fast they disappear.