Question
What are the most common misconceptions about marketing?
Answer
The word is nothing BUT misconceptions and I almost think it should be retired. It is a bloated and far-too-big umbrella term covering too much territory.
On one border, it looks indistinguishable from economics (segmentation and psychographics). On another border, you can barely tell it apart from engineering (user analytics, product testing, usability etc). On a third border, it looks like strategy (positioning, competitive strategy). On its violent disputed border with sales, where wars have been fought, permission marketing and WOM look like post-sales and sales. And on the most visible end, on which the brand of the profession hangs, it looks like entertainment.
Very little useful is achieved by taking about all this under one umbrella term. The field should be broken into little pieces, and the border areas absorbed by the respective neighboring fields (engineering, strategy, sales, post sales, PR, finance), leaving just one core area for "marketing" itself: brand maintenance through advertising (actual brand-building should be handed over to PR and strategy).
In other words, Rome has gotten too big, unwieldy and ungovernable, and lost it's raison d'etre as an empire. It needs to shrink back down to the largish city people think it is anyway. Us barbarians from neighboring territories need to invade this decadent empire.
Ironically, this is what marketing theory itself suggests is the right thing to do. The "brand" of marketing as a profession is irreversibly locked to "brand-maintenance via advertising" (some would say in a death-spiral). You cannot reposition the brand of marketing. So just accept the misconceptions as the truth and refactor the truth to fit the misconceptions better.
Part of the reason this has happened is that marketers (sorry to generalize here) tend not to be the most introspective people in the world. Most engineers know that engineering in a broad sense comprises fairly well-defined activities like manufacturing, design, testing, QA, post-sales support, R&D, supply chain operations, etc. Nobody gets really confused about what these different pieces are and how they fit together. No engineer I know would have any trouble describing this universe and where he/she fits.
By contrast, most marketers can just about tell inbound from outbound, if that. That's it. They are foggy on how they differ from sales and PR (except that they "hate those guys"). The don't get how their view of "positioning" relates to strategy's view of the same concept, etc.
The best marketers do understand all this, and marketing has its fair share of solid thinkers who help clarify all this. Unfortunately, since the barrier to entry in the field is non-existent, the average rank-and-file are people who decide they are "marketers" by default because they have no other marketable (how ironic) skills, and have no clue what they are supposed to be about. Anyone with any degree who can string a correct English sentence together, type a list into Excel and is a "people person" who likes to party, seems to think they can do marketing. And in general, they are completely ineffective.
Some of the leaders of the field are partly to blame. They've gotten into the rockstar motivational-speaker game instead of encouraging people to think hard about the fundamentals of the field and advance it. I will name no names, since the people I have in mind have tribes of acolytes ready and willing to lynch blasphemers. I've been virtually lynched before.
An exception is Al Ries, one of the few marketing authors I have found to be consistently insightful and solid. Not surprisingly, he has written books with titles like "The death of advertising and the rise of PR." Not exactly designed to make him adored by his own field.
For the record, I consider myself an amateur marketer, cross-trained over from engineering, and I've been studying and practicing the discipline hard for nearly 2 years now, and only now do I finally have a sense that I understand what I am doing, how to do it right, and why. About half the work I had to do to learn the subject was to clear away the noise to get to the core of the subject.
On one border, it looks indistinguishable from economics (segmentation and psychographics). On another border, you can barely tell it apart from engineering (user analytics, product testing, usability etc). On a third border, it looks like strategy (positioning, competitive strategy). On its violent disputed border with sales, where wars have been fought, permission marketing and WOM look like post-sales and sales. And on the most visible end, on which the brand of the profession hangs, it looks like entertainment.
Very little useful is achieved by taking about all this under one umbrella term. The field should be broken into little pieces, and the border areas absorbed by the respective neighboring fields (engineering, strategy, sales, post sales, PR, finance), leaving just one core area for "marketing" itself: brand maintenance through advertising (actual brand-building should be handed over to PR and strategy).
In other words, Rome has gotten too big, unwieldy and ungovernable, and lost it's raison d'etre as an empire. It needs to shrink back down to the largish city people think it is anyway. Us barbarians from neighboring territories need to invade this decadent empire.
Ironically, this is what marketing theory itself suggests is the right thing to do. The "brand" of marketing as a profession is irreversibly locked to "brand-maintenance via advertising" (some would say in a death-spiral). You cannot reposition the brand of marketing. So just accept the misconceptions as the truth and refactor the truth to fit the misconceptions better.
Part of the reason this has happened is that marketers (sorry to generalize here) tend not to be the most introspective people in the world. Most engineers know that engineering in a broad sense comprises fairly well-defined activities like manufacturing, design, testing, QA, post-sales support, R&D, supply chain operations, etc. Nobody gets really confused about what these different pieces are and how they fit together. No engineer I know would have any trouble describing this universe and where he/she fits.
By contrast, most marketers can just about tell inbound from outbound, if that. That's it. They are foggy on how they differ from sales and PR (except that they "hate those guys"). The don't get how their view of "positioning" relates to strategy's view of the same concept, etc.
The best marketers do understand all this, and marketing has its fair share of solid thinkers who help clarify all this. Unfortunately, since the barrier to entry in the field is non-existent, the average rank-and-file are people who decide they are "marketers" by default because they have no other marketable (how ironic) skills, and have no clue what they are supposed to be about. Anyone with any degree who can string a correct English sentence together, type a list into Excel and is a "people person" who likes to party, seems to think they can do marketing. And in general, they are completely ineffective.
Some of the leaders of the field are partly to blame. They've gotten into the rockstar motivational-speaker game instead of encouraging people to think hard about the fundamentals of the field and advance it. I will name no names, since the people I have in mind have tribes of acolytes ready and willing to lynch blasphemers. I've been virtually lynched before.
An exception is Al Ries, one of the few marketing authors I have found to be consistently insightful and solid. Not surprisingly, he has written books with titles like "The death of advertising and the rise of PR." Not exactly designed to make him adored by his own field.
For the record, I consider myself an amateur marketer, cross-trained over from engineering, and I've been studying and practicing the discipline hard for nearly 2 years now, and only now do I finally have a sense that I understand what I am doing, how to do it right, and why. About half the work I had to do to learn the subject was to clear away the noise to get to the core of the subject.