Lesson 5/Week 12: Every Day is Day One

Well, the 12 weeks have gone by quickly.  So far this week I've covered:

• Article "Community Relations 2.0"

We were asked for this week in general terms to consider what we've learned and reflect on what we think Marketing is at the end of our studies.  

I've learned a ton this quarter, and most of it will be helpful even outside of marketing.  Here are some of my key takeaways:

• Marketing is probably the most critical business discipline for success.  This is because it is the only area of business school that focuses on customers.
• Customers are everything.  They are what makes a company valuable, not what's on a company's balance sheet.  You have to obsess over them and exceed their expectations, even if you follow Apple's method of showing them what they want instead of asking them.  Even after you show a customer what they want, they will still develop expectations.  These have to be met.
• Marketing is so much more than just advertising, which is how I thought about it before the class.  Quantitative techniques like CLV and marketing analytics rival corporate finance in terms of data collection and analysis. 
• You have to compete to be different, as that's where sustainable competitive advantage will come from.  If you have strong positioning, based on solid STDP, positive outcomes are more likely.  
• The four P's is a great framework to think about marketing holistically.
• Brands are extremely valuable and difficult to compete against.  They can definitely be measured quantitatively and should be on company's balance sheets.

With these key learning points, I'd turn to my ending definition of marketing.  I really like a quote from the CLV article last week:  "marketing is quickly becoming the science and art of finding, retaining, and growing profitable customers."  

This pretty much covers every activity required by marketing, which is so much broader than I thought in week 1.  Some of it is quantitative and approaches science, like CLV's, and other activities like connecting with a customer's mind is more art.  However, just as the goal of a company is to maximize shareholder wealth, marketing's goal to find, retain, and grow profitable customers is the path to get there.  Sometimes volume and market share my be temporary goals, but I like this definition because a company that lets its marketers stray too far from this goal for too long will not maintain competitive advantage.