Contrary to What Your Boss Told You, Selling is Not Marketing

Nearly every industry has seen it happen; a firm is experiencing unprecedented growth, stealing market share and revenue from all competitors. The money is flowing in faster than they can spend it; management is richly rewarded and the CEO is on the top of the world. Then the unexpected slow down hits. So far as management can see, there seems to be no reasonable explanation. So the pressure is on to sell more products.

The management team produces sales pieces in mass, creates new special offers, and builds in incentives for the sales team. After all their best efforts, management is stumped to learn that these steps did not result in the growth they had so expected. This, as Theodore Levitt describes it, is marketing myopia (Levitt, 2004). The failure is fundamentally the failure of management.

When the necessity to turn products into cash quickly puts undo pressure on the consumer, sales flounder. The difference between marketing and selling is who being served. Selling focuses on the needs of the person doing the selling; the need to make budget, to lower inventory, or to generate cash flow. Marketing focuses on the consumers needs: how the product enhances their lives, fits within their means, or solves a problem.

Levitt goes on his article to offer the best piece of business advice available "once [management] thinks of its business as taking care of people's needs, nothing can stop it from creating its own extravagantly profitable growth."

In other words, when companies reverse their thinking from selling to creating, the customers will follow. By creating the products or services customers want to buy, selling those products is easy.

Most business executives today have reached the conclusion that the word marketing means selling and/or advertising. While advertising and sales are a part of marketing, they are not the entire scope of the term. The goal of marketing is to make selling superfluous.

When business and managers are able to rediscover the real meaning of marketing, they will find it much easier to create a loyal customer base, willing to pay more for the product that understands their needs and expectations.

Peter Drucker describes it the best: "[marketing] is the whole business seen from the point of view of its final result, that is, from the customer's point of view" (Drucker, 1954).

References:

Levitt, T. Marketing Myopia, Harvard Business Review, July/Aug 2004, Vol. 82 Issue 7/8 p132-149

Peter F. Drucker, The Practice of Management, New York: Harper & Row, 1954): p. 37