Is your marketing worth buying?
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Keywords: consumer agents, seller-centric, buyer-centric, CRM, effectiveness, database marketing
Papers Is your marketing worth buying? Alan Mitchell Received: 7 June 2001
Abstract A disconnection between what marketers want and do when they go to market and what their customers want them to do is creating a crisis of disvalue for both buyers and sellers. To overcome it, not only must ®rms create products and services that customers think are worth buying, they must also do marketing that is `worth buying' too. Marketing must go beyond helping sellers to sell, to help buyers to buy. This will involve a root-and-branch rethink of common marketing assumptions, tools and concepts, and business models. Get ready for a buyer-centric marketing revolution that will transform how companies and customers do business with each other. This paper is an adaptation of the author's presentation on the occasion of the IDM's Annual Lecture for 2001.
Practising what you preach?
A new dimension of competitor
Of all professions and disciplines Ð engineering, IT, accounting, human resources, logistics and so on Ð there is only one whose core mission is to champion the customer: marketing. Only marketing makes it its stock in trade to look at what the ®rm does from the point of view of the customer. How, exactly, does our product or service add value for the customer? Does it add enough value for the customer to think it worth buying? So here is the irony. There is also only one profession that has never had to pass marketing's stern test of consumer value: marketing itself. Yes, of course marketers focus on delivering value to the consumer. But it is universally assumed that the vehicle of this value is the ®rm's product or service, not its marketing. The questions `how does this particular marketing activity add value for the consumer?' and `would the consumer be prepared to pay for this activity if it were a product or service in its own right?' have never ®gured on the marketing Ð or corporate Ð agenda. Get ready for that to change. A new make-or-break dimension of competition is opening up: the dimension of marketing as a service to the consumer; marketing `worth buying'.
Marketing's great value block Alan S. Mitchell 121 Abbeville Road, London SW4 9JL, UK E-mail: [email protected]
Strip away speci®c activities and processes such as targeting, segmentation, positioning, advertising or direct marketing, and successful marketing boils down to the achievement of two generic functions: matching supply to demand, and connecting sellers to buyers. These two
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Both buyers and sellers do `marketing'
functions are crucial to anyone wanting to create value. If you fail to match and connect you miss out on opportunities to create value (by failing to make things that the market wants) or you destroy value (by using up resources to make things that nobody
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