Marketing Matters Now More Than Ever

Marketing is a key business driver. “Because its purpose is to create customers, the business enterprise has two basic functions: marketing and innovation.” Clearly most business leaders embrace innovation as the lifeblood of their companies today, but lately marketing has been relegated to a staff-driven, cost center by many. And that has caused waste, missed opportunities, and failure for many businesses.

Marketing as it was originally intended, in its fullest, truest, and greatest form, is more important today than ever before. The world is awash in innovative products, services, technologies, solutions, business models, etc. today. These new products must be marketed and commercialized in order to generate revenue and profit. Innovation alone cannot sustain a company; it must be paired with marketing.

Innovation Needs Marketing

We underestimate the importance of marketing in today’s innovation-fueled marketplace. Marketing is about connecting the right customers to the right product. Marketing helps sales teams, and people throughout the company, marketing think from the outside-in about what is being produced, convey its value in customer-centric ways, and break through barriers that can only be addressed through deep customer knowledge and insight.

Marketing Is Misunderstood

If marketing is so critical to business today, why is it overlooked or undervalued by so many? The way marketing has come to be defined and executed is to blame. Marketing has been reduced to customer acquisition and retention. These days, what most people consider marketing is really simply advertising. Search, email, content, and other common forms of marketing today are primarily methods for generating or maintaining awareness or repeat purchase.

But marketing is supposed to be so much more than this. Marketing, with creative directors coming up with catchy jingles and persuasive copy to induce purchases. Was born out of the Industrial Revolution, when manufacturers needed to develop products that would appeal to customers and to find ways to engage customers with them.

Marketing, therefore, needs to be less about what happens after an innovation is ready to launch, and more about getting it to be ready in the first place — by creating a new market or expanding an existing one; developing or understanding how it will fit into customers’ needs, wants, values, and lives; and building a customer experience that will turns what the innovation is offering into a complete customer solution. And marketing needs to be less defined by a budget and managed by a department, and more embraced as a business discipline throughout the organization.

As business continues to be driven by innovation in this era and beyond, marketing must be embraced, developed and valued more than ever.