Inexperienced companies regard marketing as medicine to be taken when something is wrong. (“Not enough customers? Take some marketing and call me in the morning.â€)
This is completely wrong-headed thinking, and it’s one of the reasons so many otherwise successful businesses wind up failing. They get used to feeling busy…until they realize it’s too late to start what they should have been doing all along.
Marketing is food. It’s the regular, sustained nourishment that gets your business where you want it—and keeps it there. You need it throughout the day, every day.
Peter Drucker, one of the leading experts on management theory, wrote:
Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two—and only two—basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.
He also wrote:
Marketing is not only much broader than selling; it is not a specialized activity at all. It encompasses the entire business. It is the whole business seen from the point of view of its final result, that is from the customer’s point of view. Concern and responsibility for marketing must therefore permeate all areas of the enterprise.
This perspective is what keeps Fortune 500 companies so intense about sustained, well-funded marketing—even when they’re already successful by any measure.
While inexperienced businesses wait until they’re starving to start looking for nourishment, these savvy enterprises eat regular, healthy meals throughout the day, keeping them strong and thriving year after year.
Excerpt from forte agency
