There are two disciplines in this world that are most misunderstood. One is accounting. In the public's perception, an accountant is just a "bookkeeper," and in many companies, the greatest value of an accountant is "cooking the books." Many people don't understand why a "bookkeeper" needs to pass the "Certified Public Accountant" exam, which is said to be extremely difficult. The good news is that in recent years, with the active capital markets, people's understanding of accountants and accounting firms has greatly improved. They now know their importance in regulating corporate operations and that they are also called "economic police." Especially for companies seeking to go public or attract capital, they must take a good "accounting lesson." But the discipline that suffers even more misunderstanding is "marketing." At least accountants know they are far more than just "bookkeepers," and the capital at the top of the business food chain understands that accounting is not just about keeping books. The tragedy of marketing is that most business owners think marketing is just "selling goods," and even most people in marketing think they are just "sellers."
I have a comb, you have a monk, a perfect match—that's "good marketing." Whether it's a white cat or a black cat, if it sells, it's a good cat. As long as your thinking doesn't slip, there are more solutions than difficulties. There are no unsellable goods in the world, only people who can't sell them... Based on this logic, Chinese marketing is basically divided into five major schools: The first is the "Idea School," which claims to "pierce the sky with a needle," turning stone into gold. They give the same thing a different spin, a new name, a catchy slogan, or a different "positioning," instantly turning the ordinary into the magical. Of course, the Idea School must be supported by massive advertising. The second is the "Hype School," which euphemistically calls itself "creating momentum." It's an upgraded version of the Idea School. They create concepts, create anxiety, create hot topics, and even create the illusion of hot sales, fabricating celebrities and facts. The hype school's promotional methods have also become diverse. The third is the "Relationship School," where the most lethal term is "get it done." The ways to "get it done" may include personal connections, drinking, kickbacks, "a little token," or even seduction—all collectively called "customer relations." Of course, the most common situation is "can't get it done" but pretending to "get it done," muddling through or calling it "integrating resources," and maybe they actually fool people. If exposed, they move to the next target and continue to claim they can "get it done." The fourth is the "Pep Talk School," which recruits a large number of salespeople, gives them dreams—"To succeed, go crazy; keep it simple and charge forward"—and makes them fight for their dreams, daring to "show their sword," thus pushing products to the market or to distributors with minimal labor costs. The fifth is the "System School," which is an extension of the Pep Talk School. They use the banner of "marketing is a system" to constrain salespeople with various rules, ultimately to make it easier for the boss to control them. Combined with "pep talks," the effect is doubled. The common feature of these five major schools is "everything revolves around closing the deal," short, flat, and fast, seemingly hitting the flesh with every punch, and the knife draws blood as soon as it cuts. To be fair, these "marketing" schools have achieved brilliance in the past; otherwise, they wouldn't still have so many followers today and remain the mainstream of "marketing" in the market. Now many have put on the cloak of the internet or "platforms." But the problem is that in the last decade, these tactics that once dominated have all failed: consumers seem smarter, and carefully designed concept disguises are easily exposed; and young people today also seem smarter—what's poured in is chicken blood, but what spills out is often dog blood. Has marketing failed? Of course not, because these sales-oriented tactics should be part of marketing, but not the most important part. Once a company puts all its energy into these tactics, it loses the true meaning of marketing and goes in the opposite direction. In severe cases, it becomes a fraudulent enterprise. This is not true marketing. What is true marketing? It's simple if you put it simply, but complex if you go into detail. Old Miao has been in marketing for over twenty years, starting in sales, where he could explain his job in one sentence. But since switching to marketing, it's been a complete mess. To this day, none of my relatives can figure out what I do. In the early years, they were quite worried about me: this guy doesn't drink, doesn't socialize, doesn't fit in, has extremely low emotional intelligence, and is never afraid of offending people—will he starve or get beaten up in marketing? Don't worry, marketing has many definitions. Let's start with the simplest: Marketing is profitably satisfying needs. This is the most concise definition, clear, right? The core issue of marketing is "satisfying needs," not "seeking transactions." The essence of marketing management is demand management, not "sales target management." Drucker's most famous saying about marketing: Marketing makes selling unnecessary. This doesn't mean eliminating salespeople or disparaging sales work. It means that if you do "satisfying needs" well enough, transactions will happen naturally, and the sales cost will be extremely low or even zero. When you put "needs" at the core of marketing, your focus and perspective naturally shift to "value creation," "target market," "brand communication," "positioning," "value delivery," and "value dissemination." That's true marketing. But when you put "selling goods" at the core, you naturally focus on attracting distributors, hype, traffic, monetization, concept packaging, customer relations, and even resort to deceptive selling, pyramid schemes, hard selling, bribery, or seduction—all "pseudo-marketing." One is "sitting in the sky and looking at the well" (a new idiom learned from Teacher Zeng Xiangwen), where value accumulates gradually and transactions happen naturally; the other is "sitting in the well and looking at the sky," with eyes full of sales targets, but in the end, it's like a flower in a mirror or the moon in water—a futile effort. After reading the simplest definition, let's look at the social definition of marketing: Marketing is a societal process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through creating, offering, and freely exchanging products and services of value with others. Consumers and businesses co-creating and sharing value is the most important theme of modern marketing. The significance of this definition is to point out the core concept of marketing—value—and based on this core concept, divide marketing into four major areas: discovering value, creating value, delivering value, and communicating value. If you are not a marketer, knowing the above two definitions will prevent you from misunderstanding marketing. If you are a business owner, at least you won't confuse "Feng Jing" with "Ma Liang" and lead yourself into a ditch. But if you are a marketer or a boss who values marketing highly, you must understand the professional definition of marketing, because a professional definition clearly defines the discipline, helps you accurately identify its core elements, and know how to apply it correctly. Marketing is 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. The inseparable concept—"marketing management"—is professionally defined as: Marketing management is the art and science of choosing target markets and building profitable relationships with them through creating, delivering, and communicating superior customer value. These two are definitions from the American Marketing Association. It's worth noting that the previous AMA definition of marketing management was: Marketing management is the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of ideas, goods, and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational goals. Can you see the fundamental change between the two? The previous definition emphasized process; the earlier versions of "Marketing Management" had a subtitle called "Analysis, Planning, Implementation, and Control." The current definition emphasizes orientation: customer acquisition and the creation, delivery, and communication of value. With the concise, social, and professional definitions of marketing in mind, it becomes clear what marketing is for, what it needs to do, and what its basis and criteria are. As follows: Core concept: Value Basic areas: Discover value, create value, deliver value, communicate value Basic process: R—STP—4P—I—C, starting with insight, planning with STP, landing on 4P, implementing, and cycling back through feedback Basic concepts (18): Needs, wants, demands, market segmentation, target market, positioning, offerings, brand, channels, media (paid, earned, owned), impressions, engagement, expected value, satisfaction, supply chain, competition, marketing organization, marketing environment Peripheral concepts (many, and forms will keep changing): Consumer profiles, product development, creativity, product concepts, services, advertising, packaging, logos, public relations, promotional activities, delivery, distributors, terminals, traffic, scenarios, selling, interaction, after-sales, word-of-mouth, social networks, etc. In the end, even explaining the professional marketing concept clearly is just a matter of one table. So why do most people fail to understand it, even many insiders are confused? Part of the reason is, of course, short-sightedness: they have something in hand and just want to sell it, unwilling to consider customer value and needs. We often hear illogical statements like "The market lacks good products, only good marketing." I come into contact with hundreds of companies each year, and very few can truly be called good products. Most are "semi-finished products" that are self-serving, lack core value, and have unclear demand. To cater to such corporate needs, many people appear as fortune-tellers, casually creating a hit product, a miracle, or selling combs to monks. Wanting to take shortcuts but ending up in a ditch is the state of most companies. However, the culprit that causes widespread misunderstanding of marketing and thereby harms many companies and marketers is the term "marketing" itself. We know that "marketing" is a borrowed word, a translation of "Marketing." This might be the worst translation in two hundred years of Chinese translation history—an absolute disaster. "Marketing" is the present participle of "Market," meaning everything in the market, including market elements, phenomena, and operating rules, with an emphasis on dynamism. We know that Chinese has no present participle, meaning there is no exact equivalent for "Marketing" in Chinese; the closest would be "市场学" (market studies) or "市场管理学" (market management). But the original translator, for some reason, translated "Marketing" as "营销" (yingxiao), taking the meanings of "operation" and "sales." This made two fatal errors: First, it failed to reflect the core elements of "Marketing"—"needs" and "value"—but used the meanings of "operation" and "sales," which easily leads marketing into a "sales orientation." Sales is only the tip of the iceberg of marketing. Once a company conducts market work around sales, it will inevitably lose the essence and fall into the five schools I mentioned at the beginning, harming itself, others, and the company. Second, the perspective of this translation is entirely enterprise-oriented. Whether it's operation or sales, it's from the enterprise's perspective, which is precisely a taboo in market work. Market work emphasizes the customer perspective and market perspective. Once the perspective is wrong, a large number of YY-type companies and narcissistic products will be born. "If the name is not correct, words will not be in accord." Moreover, the term "营销" has been severely stigmatized, leading to many bizarre phenomena: Some people who are good at hype and concept creation are called marketing masters or gods. Marketing is often associated with cheating, deception, and trickery. Marketers are thought of as selling "dog skin plasters" or "power pills." Some exaggerated advertising and excessive packaging are even called "over-marketing," but that's actually anti-marketing, isn't it? Many companies avoid the term "marketing" like the plague. Duan Yongping, a boss known for marketing, says his company values products most, not marketing. Dong Mingzhu, who rose through marketing, says her company relies on mastering core technology and is most resistant to marketing... Modern economics clearly includes "Marketing" in the category of applied economics. Kotler even says "'Marketing' is another term for behavioral economics." If "accounting" is the "economic police," then "Marketing" is the most fundamental driving force of economic development, because it studies and applies the most basic thing in economics—demand. The essence of Marketing management is demand management. Without Marketing, economics is a tree without roots. The most important reason for our weak domestic demand is the impotence of "Marketing." The backwardness of China's economy is first the backwardness of "Marketing," not technology. It's not that we can't make better chips; we lack the application system to put chips on the market. Our lagging industries are often not in pure high-tech fields but in areas closely related to "Marketing." Semiconductors, large aircraft, aircraft carriers, aerospace—we are catching up, and some are already leading. But in milk powder, cosmetics, luxury goods, and even clothing and FMCG, we are always defeated. Deng Xiaoping once said, "Science and technology are the primary productive forces." But in today's market economy, "Marketing is the primary productive force." Even though "Marketing" is so important, under the stigmatized background, the cultivation of talent is very worrying. Dr. Wang Sai of Kotler Company said that in a certain year, Fudan University's marketing major only recruited four students. Those top students couldn't bear that their excellent academic performance led them to a major that studies "selling goods." According to Professor Jing Fengjie of East China University of Science and Technology and Professor He Jiaxun, translator of the 15th edition of "Marketing Management," currently, prestigious universities generally have difficulty recruiting students for marketing majors, while some ordinary or even second- and third-tier colleges have popular marketing majors. This is all due to the misunderstanding of "marketing." Marketing needs to be redefined, and China's "marketing" needs an enlightenment movement. Many experts in the industry resonate with this. In October this year, old man Kotler came to Beijing to hold a summit, conveying the most classic "Marketing" concept system, which I believe can bring a huge wave of "value marketing return" to China. Yesterday, Teacher Jing Fengjie wrote on his Moments: "As a discipline, Marketing should be translated as 市场学 (market studies) or 市场经营学 (market operations). As a corporate management function, translating it as 市场经营管理 (market operations management) would be less prone to misinterpretation. Fortunately, China's oldest and most authoritative national first-level society is called the China Marketing Association of Universities, which is committed to promoting the application and practice of marketing theory in China." If your tip is adopted, we will pay 400-2000 yuan.