# 181: Marketing Squared
Story behind the Passage
“No matter what we do, we will have to sell it to them in some way,” my friend said today in a long conversation about a project we are about to start. It is not even a project for us. It is a project to save an organization. But it was just one out of the many conversations nowadays in which there is one dominant term: marketing. Everything is about marketing these days. If you are an entrepreneur, you learn what this actually means. And it does mean a lot, you have no idea. Yes, even consumers use the term sometimes when they see something in the super market and they know it is not a good product but they see the company spends much money on advertising. Then they say: “Oh, this is all marketing. I bought this before and it was packaged in a different way but it is still a bad product.”
Unfortunately, if you are at the other end of the seller-buyer-spectrum, i.e., if you are the entrepreneur and you have to sell a product or service that is not crappy, which is actually quite valuable, you think about marketing a lot as well. You think about marketing in a way that you might never have imagined before. This is why I picked the McKinsey Quarterly from 2014 from my shelf today. I wanted to see what it says about marketing, about the rising role of marketing in the future. I was surprised to not find that much about it explicitly in the articles. This is quite surprising because everything else in there, e.g., the future role of machine learning, organizational cultural change, the war for talents, etc., are right to the point when looking at it from today’s perspective. But there is not too much about marketing. Still, there is something that caught my attention with respect to my marketing frustration.
My Learnings
“You have to identify new capabilities that will be needed down the road, in both current markets and new markets the company is considering.” This is exactly the issue. I think that people, companies, did pay attention to future capabilities in the past. But I think, they mostly thought of primary value creation, i.e., core products and services. I mean, as an entrepreneur, you always think about this and it does not cost you too much effort because it is somehow in your DNA. But the issue of new markets emerging — really new markets because of the digital platform economy — probably was underestimated. And the thing that probably was underestimated the most was marketing.
If you look at the issue from the strategic perspective that is suggested in the article, you might very well say that recognizing marketing as a market as such could have opened up many chances for businesses as well. For sure, I am not only talking about marketing as a disaster to your business if you lack the respective capabilities. I am also talking about the great things marketing can open up to companies that have understood the power of network effects early on. And the problem starts exactly there: Network effects make things happen very quickly. But the point is, you need to have strategy beforehand to create the right content to spread via the networks. And that does not happen overnight. It takes much knowledge about future markets and about the practical steps that digital marketing requires. The problem is: small and medium-sized companies, particularly in the education and NGO sector, simply do not have this knowledge. Even worse — they did not have it many years ago when strategic action would have been required.
So, when you sit there now and your business is being destroyed by others, you cannot make up for this mistake. I know, this is not new, of course, and it is not unique to the digital business age. If you were bad at strategy 50 years ago, you probably also ended up in a worse situation than competitors (please, I am not valuing strategy more than anything else, but it matters). But I have the impression that it is just so brutal nowadays. You simply have no chance to survive. What touches me so much: Content really does not matter anymore. It is all about algorithms and visibility. It is not about what is written in the messages that the algorithms identify and help spread. Hardly anybody reads content that is longer than a tweet anymore. But if you are not present in all the networks, the algorithm has no chance of spotting you. Before you even know what is happening, you are gone.
It is so tragic and people who have never run a business probably have no clue what this actually means. If you are employed, you can be a marketing specialist. Really, you always think that if things go wrong, you might be blamed, but you will be saved, i.e., keep your job. But as an entrepreneur, there is no backup. You know that business is about YOU winning clients. This is all it is about. If you fail in this, nobody will come around the corner saving you. They do not care if you simply missed to see the marketing wave erupting in the past. They do not care how wonderful your work is. They do not care that you built up a business for 30 years or more and now some 20-year olds are copying it and selling your products — MARKETING them — to the millions.
The latter thing is what pisses me off right now. Yes, marketing expertise itself is something really valuable, no doubt. But, really, why are there not more “consumer literacy” courses offered that teach people to look at stuff twice? I am not saying that 20-something year olds cannot invent very intelligent and valuable products. Unfortunately, however, they usally do not; most highly valuable companies still emerge from universities. And they do not even know that what they are selling with the help of so much investment money — and money from the government — is simply shitty. Still, they are being celebrated as the winners while the real experts, the ones with decade-long experience, are crying because their lifework is gone — destroyed by marketing bulldozers.
Since I am an optimist by nature, I do believe that some will still make it. This is because there is one thing that does not die: intelligence. If people were smart enough to invent brilliant things in the past, they certainly have the capability to invent new things in difficult situations again. But along with intelligence, even great intelligence, you often also find introversion and humility. While these are outstandingly great attributes, they do not help you if you need others to help you solve your marketing problem. And it takes digital marketing experts to suruvive in the marketing jungle. What I wish, therefore, is that the great pioneers of the past, especially in the education sector, have the courage to become loud, to raise their voice, to ask for help, to network, and even to plead. This might not feel nice but it is the only chance of being heard in a marketing squared world.
Reflection Questions
1) Do you think that the online marketing boom will cease again?
2) Did you ever suffer because you were too proud to ask for help?
3) Are there any companies in your environment that could be saved if someone helped them with digital marketing?