What is Marketing?

As I stated in the comments to your blog post, I think your definition of marketing is extremely wrong -- what you're describing is advertising (or, more importantly, performance-driven or metrics-driven advertising).

Continuing to perpetuate the idea that marketing and advertising are the same thing is pretty uninformed.

It's like calling a systems engineer and a front-end web developer the same thing -- they're both engineering, right?

The marketing definition is a bit weak. Analyzing the market and determining who will pay and ways to make the market aware of the product are certainly major aspects of marketing, but they don't provide the entire picture. Interestingly enough, new product development is a huge function of marketing. Most engineers don't like to think of themselves as marketers (at least I assume so), but in fact much of what they do is a function of marketing.

It's fascinating that the common response between these comments and those on the blog basically boil down to "product development is marketing too" and "every activity with the customer is marketing".

If that's the case, then let's throw out the word marketing and talk about the real issue because debating what that word means misses the point.

At some point, after your developers have built your shiznit you have to find some customers. You have to take your widget and get it in front of a person who will pay for it. You have to get customers.

Call this marketing, call it sales, call it advertising...call it whatever the heck you want to call it. The point is...it's not easy. All of us jerks in product development think that the idiots in marketing just spend money and ads and the magic happens, but it's not so simple.

We could sit around the campfire for hours and tell stories of great products that didn't make it because they couldn't get enough customers. Because there was a failure of the <insert what you want to call it here>.

Check out this framework: http://www.pragmaticmarketing.com/pdf/PragmaticMarketingFram...

When i first saw this it made hiring and sorting out non-tech jobs much clearer in my mind. Though i wish there was a version of this for consumer Internet type companies.

William Davidow's (of Intel) definition is as true as ever:

"Marketing must invent complete products and drive them to commanding positions in defendable market segments"

If you subscribe to this vision, things like advertising, promotions and product development become easy to align.