What Is Marketing?

Don't ask her. She has no idea.

Credit: Alexandra Marcu

What is marketing? It sounds like a simple question, but if you were to ask a thousand business owners what marketing actually is, you’d probably get a thousand different answers.

Some would say marketing is to do with advertising, or branding, or Google Ads or email campaigns. Not many would be able to give you a clearly defined answer.

So when it came to writing my book Marketing Renegade, I knew that I had to nail down exactly what marketing is, both for the reader, and for Freddy, the main character.

This is the definition I came up with:

“Marketing is a scalable system that turns strangers into customers.”

To explain it further, I'll hand over to the two main characters from the book, Freddy and the Marketing Renegade himself...

"But turning strangers into customers just sounds like selling?” Freddy asked, struggling to see the difference.

“I hear you Freddy. Marketing and sales are closely related, so let’s explore them together. When you sell to someone, what’s the first thing you do?”

“I ask lots of questions to understand the customer’s requirements.”

“Then what?”

“I demonstrate how my product meets those requirements.”

“Ok, good. What then?” “Well, if I’ve demonstrated enough value, they agree to my prices and I’ve got myself a sale.”

“And if you haven’t demonstrated enough value?”

“I handle their objections. And if they’re still not going for it, we negotiate on price. But that’s always the last resort!”

The Marketing Renegade laughed. “So is it fair to say each sale is different? Some negotiations are easier than others?” he asked.

“Absolutely.”

“And you’re usually making one sale at a time?”

“Yes, some deals are bigger than others, obviously, but sure, I can only get one customer at a time.”

For the first time in the conversation, Freddy was starting to see where the Marketing Renegade was heading.

“So you see Freddy, selling face to face or over the phone, powerful though it is, is a ‘one-to-one’ gig. The beauty of marketing, however, is it’s ‘one-to-many’. But in marketing you don’t get the luxury of tweaking your pitch half way through if you’re not getting buying signals, or lowering the price at the last minute to appease a difficult objection. Marketers have to engineer an entire journey, end to end. A journey so smart and carefully calibrated that it turns strangers into customers, at scale.”