Marketing: For Your Customers

First, remove the thought that marketing is selling your product. Theodore Levitt wrote a 1960 article for the Harvard Business Review that outlined the difference between selling and marketing. In his Marketing Myopia piece, Levitt wrote, "The difference between marketing and selling is more than semantic. Selling focuses on the needs of the seller, marketing on the needs of the buyer. Selling is preoccupied with the seller's need to convert his product into cash; marketing with satisfying the needs of the customer by means of the product and the whole cluster of things associated with creating, delivering, and finally consuming it."

Second, the business plan and a strategic marketing plan are synonymous. Levitt went on to write, "A truly marketing-minded firm strives to create value-satisfying goods and services that consumers will want to buy. What it offers for sale includes not only the generic product or service, but how it is made available to the customer, in what form, when, under what conditions, and at what terms of trade. Most important, what it offers for sale is determined by the buyer. You take your cues from the buyer in such a way that the product becomes a consequence of the marketing effort, not vice versa."

Third, building an effective customer-oriented company involves far more than good intentions or promotional tricks; it involves profound matters of human organization and leadership. A solid, workable plan for the business is paramount. It is fostered by a leader with a vision of grandeur, a vision that can produce eager followers in vast numbers. The chief executive sets the company's style, its direction, and its goals, which are inherent in the company's plans for serving the needs of its customers.

Levitt added, those followers are customers, so the entire business must be viewed as a customer-creating and customer-satisfying organism. The business must think of itself as doing the things that will make people want to do business with it.

It's more than mere survival in this economic climate. As Levitt so eloquently wrote, "The trick is to survive gallantly, to feel the surging pulse of commercial mastery; not just to experience the sweet smell of success, but to have the visceral feel of enterpreneurial greatness."