“When we can afford it we will start doing some marketing”
This is something I hear regularly from startups. Many startups have an idea, a lot of energy and a bit of money and go off without a marketing stategy. It keeps surprising me that marketing is often seen as ‘something we can do later, when there is more money to be spend’. It seems as if it is seen as something for specialists. In reality marketing your products and services is so important that you should not leave it up to a marketing department. And absolutely not leave it until later.
It all starts with marketing
To show you why, the most recent, approved in 2013, general and worldwide accepted definition of marketing:
“The activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large”.
(source: A.M.A)
The BusinessDictionary gives an explanation of marketing and also explains the difference between marketing and selling. Often these are considered to be the same but as you can see this is not the case.
“Marketing is based on thinking about the business in terms of customer needs and their satisfaction. Marketing differs from selling because (in the words of professor Levitt) “Selling concerns itself with the tricks and techniques of getting people to exchange their cash for your product. It is not concerned with the values that the exchange is all about. And it does not, as marketing does, view the entire business process as consisting of a tightly integrated effort to discover, create, arouse and satisfy customer needs.”
In other words, marketing has less to do with getting customers to pay for your product as it does developing a demand for that product and fulfilling the customer’s needs.”
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