b2b-marketing-signal-and-the-ideas-i-find-interesting

Marketing buzzword — for me, that's a term that's been gaining momentum for quite a while now. Taking up the challenge, over the past few days I've tried, on one hand, to catch up on what I'd missed, and on the other, to bring some order to my marketing knowledge, starting precisely with the definitions of various concepts.

Browsing through dozens of pieces, I came across a very interesting article by Samuel Scott titled “Everything the Tech World Says About Marketing Is Wrong” (published on TechCrunch). In the first part of the article, Scott aptly compares how marketing departments operated in the second half of the 1990s with how things looked just ten years later. He places the dividing line between these two drastically different worlds at the moment of broader digitalization, and with it, the arrival of a new channel and its growing share of the marketing mix. That, in turn, brought new methodology, a new strategic approach, and above all new knowledge and different needs on the part of the end audience. The author also tackles the concept of content marketing — aptly, in my view — pointing out that content marketing has always been an inseparable part of marketing activity, both in the digital era and before it. The only real difference now is that we have an additional set of channels available, namely the internet and mobile devices. Both of these areas open up far more ways to vary the format of content. Back in the 1950s, a marketer could already create content and place it in all sorts of print formats, which ultimately appeared either in the press or outdoors. Today the difference is that content can be freely varied in real time, and online has replaced print — this is where things like YouTube or any form of display advertising come in. Everything moves online, which does offer more room to play with format, but is by no means a guarantee of success. Scott gives what might be the best possible example here — Apple. How did Apple become the most valuable brand in the world? Through TV and print advertising. So the conclusion that ties it all together might be this: tools and channels change, but the underlying process stays the same.

This example of content marketing and its significance “yesterday and today” illustrates very well the problem the whole industry is currently grappling with — in short, dressing up old, proven marketing tactics in new clothes, giving a false impression of innovation and breakthrough thinking. According to Scott, many companies — marketing agencies chief among them — make money by manufacturing new theories, which hurts marketers and badly distorts the market. Marketing evangelists keep churning out ever catchier slogans, luring in both companies and marketers. In the vast majority of cases, these are just variations on old, tried-and-tested tools. You only need to visit any marketing website — Polish or foreign — to be bombarded with slogans like content is king, WOMM, or the one that's been especially popular lately — growth hacking. Marketers and companies get lost in clouds of pseudo-knowledge and far-fetched theories unsupported by experience or actual numbers (numbers always speak for themselves, regardless of the company, its size, or its product category). The sheer number of theories, and their many variations and mutations, spread like a virus among marketers, many of whom genuinely lack even basic knowledge of marketing theory. Marketers wandering in the fog very often get only a fraction of real knowledge — or, perhaps more accurately, a handful of useful tricks — usually from podcasts hosted by internet celebrities (who frequently have nothing to do with real marketing!), blogs, and the like. It's a shortcut, and an appealing one — certainly more engaging than the textbook fundamentals you could learn from practitioners with years of experience, or from a proper marketing degree.

I think the experts who specialize in producing new theories certainly deserve credit for their ambition and their skill at monetizing tools everyone already knows. Unfortunately, all too often this has little to do with the everyday practice of marketing and the real problems companies face. Search Amazon for “marketing,” books only, and you'll get more than 70,000 results. Which one will you pick?