Why Marketing is Dead, Steve

My estimable colleague Steve Tobak recently posted his opinion on why there are so many "marketing is dead" articles on the web. In his post, he points out that there aren't many "sales is dead" or "finance is dead" articles. He then suggests the reason for the "marketing is dead" posts is that marketers are doing too much lead generation and not enough "product and positioning."

Well, that's certainly an original viewpoint.

In fact, the reason that there aren't many "sales is dead" or "finance is dead" articles is because if you don't have sales and don't have finances, you don't have a company.

By contrast, there are plenty of B2B firms that get by on little or no marketing. (As evidence of this, note the evergreen popularity of numerous do-it-yourself-marketing Sales Machine posts like "Find Hot Sales Leads in 6 Easy Steps.")

The truth is that B2B marketing groups are like human resources groups -- nice to have, but not strictly necessary. The fountain of "marketing is dead" posts is the result of the business world finally awakening from a 50 year management fad that treated marketing as the be-all and end-all of business.

It's not and it never was.

Here's the real situation in B2B. A good marketing group makes life easier for the sales team by creating demand (i.e. lead generation), raising awareness (i.e. lead generation), targeted advertising (i.e. lead generation) and measurable prospect nurturing (i.e. lead generation) and, yes, branding (i.e. lead generation.)

Marketing is a service organization, not a core function of a company and definitely not strategic.

Now, Steve is completely right in thinking that product and positioning are important. Where he goes wrong is putting those functions in the marketing bailiwick.

In most cases, the REAL product strategy is going to be set, not by the marketing group, but by engineering or R&D. That's certainly true in high tech, where marketing groups seldom play much of a significant role in product design and development, even in companies with better-than-average marketing. (See Apple Marketing's Top 10 Dumb Mistakes.)

As for "positioning", that's a whole 'nuther can of worms. I figure that product positioning should take about one person one hour per product. I mean, is it really that difficult? (e.g. "Uh... this is a smartphone that has a stylus; the iPhone doesn't"... Bingo. Positioning solved.)

But that's not how it works in real life marketing.

In many marketing groups, product positioning becomes this complex political battle where each person and each marketing group vies to position their product as the favored one (and hence capture the biggest budget).

Endless discussions result in "rationalizing" the product line, and then in a "product positioning" document that goes out to the sales team, who promptly takes one look at it and has one of two reactions: 1) WTF? or 2) ROFLMAO!

The reason for the confusion and hilarity is simple. Sales pros know that an entire company, much less a marketing group, cannot position its products. That job belongs to the customers, who are going to do it for you, willy-nilly, and there's very little that you can do to influence their perception, short of working directly with them to customize your offering.

Of course, real B2B marketing (i.e. lead generation) isn't really dead. What's dead is the strategic, head-in-the-clouds, let's-pretend-we're-junior-engineers, marketing-should-be-running-the-show kind of marketing that Steve seems to think is essential to a company's success.

That's the kind of marketing that's being declared dead. Sorry, Steve, even though you're almost always dead right in your posts, you got this one dead wrong.