by Paul Osuch

Created on: January 23, 2007   Last Updated: April 30, 2007

You're saying, "Five common misconceptions? What about the other hundred?" Well, I want to string out this article over a number of entries so for this one I'm starting with five. I'll get to the others later... or maybe I won't.

Everybody seems to know Marketing. The world is full of Marketing gurus. The biggest will be the people in your company - generally people not in the Marketing Department. In fact, all of them are not in the Marketing department. If any of them were actually in the Marketing department all your problems would be solved because you would have a Marketing guru in the team to solve it.

I was looking through the article by William Hii with the title "Fice common misconceptions about Marketing" and felt a little, well, disappointed. In each of the five points William points out a potential misconception and then unfortunately does not expand or correct it. So, with the goal of lessening the confusion and getting on his bad side, let's look at his points. My replies to his points begin with the big "REPLY :", just in case it ain't clear.

1. Defining Marketing - There is clearly a general tendency in employing the notion of Marketing within a confusing mix of Public Relations, Advertising, or Media Planning. Regardless of the degree in evolution and growing of Marketing, many of us still cannot understand what Marketing really is and only see the its extreme manifestations. Many believe Marketing is a useless, fancy field, eating up budgets and giving little in return. Others see Marketing as an artistic field, where all you need is creativity to develop a memorable ad.

REPLY : So what is Marketing? Many believe it is blah, many believe it is blah blah. This is one of the problems with Marketing. Many of the people who claim to be Marketing gurus are not even Marketing novices. It would be like me listing five misconceptions about pole dancing. Or Lindsay Lohan... listing five misconceptions about pole dancing.

Marketing is any activity that connects producers to consumers. Marketing is about identifying needs/wants and finding and implementing solutions that satisfy those needs and wants. According to Brian Norris, Marketing is "The process of repeatedly moving people closer to making a decision to purchase, use, follow, refer, upload, download, obey, reject, conform, become complacent to another person's, society's or organization's value." Simply, if it doesn't facilitate a "sale" then it's not marketing. And that's without referring to Philip

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