Marketing is the profitable satisfaction of needs.
The market has changed dramatically this year. It's gratifying to see many companies truly seize opportunities and make significant progress. It's disheartening to see even more companies led into the ditch of "traffic is king" and various fabricated new concepts. No business is without setbacks, but what pains Lao Miao is that if our companies had a basic understanding of marketing, these pitfalls could be avoided. If they remain trapped in misunderstandings of "marketing," they may never find their way out.
This previously published article is, in Lao Miao's view, the most important one since he started writing (the second is "No Middleman to Take the Spread Is the Biggest Marketing Lie"). In the future, I will adjust and repost it based on circumstances, so more people can have at least a correct basic understanding of marketing. Our communication efficiency will greatly improve, and we will step on far fewer pitfalls.
-01-
There are two disciplines most misunderstood in this world. One is accounting. In the public perception, an accountant is just a "bookkeeper," and in many companies, the greatest value of an accountant is "cooking the books."
Many 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 with the active capital markets in recent years, 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 those companies seeking listing or capital entry must take a good "accounting lesson."
But even more misunderstood 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 "bookkeeping."
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 white cat or black cat, as long as it sells, it's a good cat; As long as thoughts don't slip, methods are more than difficulties; There are no unsellable goods, only people who can't sell...
-02-
Based on this logic, Chinese marketing is basically divided into five major schools.
The first is the Idea School, claiming to "pierce the sky with a needle," turning stone into gold.
Give the same thing a different story, a new name, a flashy slogan, or a different "positioning," and instantly turn the ordinary into the magical.
Of course, the Idea School must be supported by massive advertising.
The second is the Hype School, euphemistically called "creating momentum," actually an upgraded version of the Idea School.
They create concepts, anxiety, hot topics, even fake hot sales, fictional celebrities, and fabricated facts. Their promotional tactics have become diverse.
The third is the Relationship School, whose most lethal term is "get it done."
Getting it done may involve friendship, 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 actually fooling people. If exposed, they just switch to another target and continue.
The fourth is the Kool-Aid School.
They recruit a large sales force, give them dreams: "To succeed, go crazy; simple-minded, charge forward."
Let them fight for their dreams, dare to "draw their swords," thus pushing products to market or to distributors at the lowest labor cost.
The fifth is the System School, actually an extension of the Kool-Aid School.
They use the banner of "marketing is a system" to constrain salespeople with various rules, ultimately to make it easier for bosses to control them.
Combined with "Kool-Aid," the effect multiplies.
The common feature of these five mainstream schools is "everything revolves around closing deals," short, flat, and fast, seemingly hitting the flesh, drawing blood with each cut.
To be fair, these "marketing" schools have achieved brilliance; otherwise, they wouldn't still have so many followers today and remain the mainstream of "marketing" in the market, now often dressed in internet, platform, or traffic clothing.
But the problem is that in the last decade, these once-dominant tactics have all failed.
Consumers seem smarter; carefully designed concept disguises are easily exposed. Young people today also seem smarter; what's poured in as Kool-Aid often splashes out as dog blood.
Is marketing failing?
Of course not. These tactics centered on "closing deals" should be part of marketing, but in most cases, not the most important part.
Once a company focuses all its energy on these tactics, it loses the true meaning of marketing and goes in the opposite direction. In severe cases, it becomes possessed and turns into a fraudulent enterprise.
This is not true marketing.
-03-
What is true marketing? It's simple if you look at it simply, but complex if you look at it deeply.
Lao 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 total mess. To this day, none of his relatives can figure out what he does. In the early years, they worried:
This guy doesn't drink, doesn't socialize, doesn't fit in, has extremely low EQ, never fears offending people—will he starve in marketing, or get beaten up?
Don't worry. Marketing has many definitions. Let's start with the simplest:
Marketing is the profitable satisfaction of needs.
That's 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 is making selling unnecessary. This doesn't mean eliminating salespeople or disparaging sales work (sales' importance is self-evident). It means that if you do "satisfying needs" well enough, transactions occur easily, and sales costs are extremely low or even zero.
When you make "needs" 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.
When you make "selling goods" the core, you naturally focus on attracting distributors, hype, traffic, monetization, concept packaging, customer relations, and even resort to deceptive sales, pyramid schemes, hard selling, bribery, or seduction—all "fake marketing."
One is "sitting on the sky and viewing the well" (copyright belongs to Teacher Zeng Xiangwen), where value accumulates gradually and transactions occur easily.
The other is sitting in the well and viewing the sky, eyes full of sales targets, but ending up with moon in the water, a futile attempt.
After 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 marketing's core concept—value—and based on this, divide marketing into four major parts: discovering value, creating value, delivering value, and communicating value.
If you're not a marketing professional, knowing these two definitions is enough. If you're a business owner, at least you won't mistake one thing for another and lead your company into a ditch.
-04-
But if you're a marketer or a boss who values marketing, you must understand the professional definition.
Because a professional definition clearly delineates the discipline and helps you accurately identify its core elements, which is the prerequisite for correct application.
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.
Inseparable from this is the professional definition of "marketing management":
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 by the American Marketing Association. Notably, 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.
Do you see the fundamental change?
The previous definition emphasized process; earlier editions of "Marketing Management" had a subtitle: "Analysis, Planning, Implementation, Control"; the current definition emphasizes orientation: customer increase and value creation, delivery, and communication.
With the concise, social, and professional definitions, it's easy to understand what marketing does, what tasks it involves, and the basis and criteria for action. As follows:
Core concept: value;
Basic parts: discovering value, creating value, delivering value, communicating value;
Basic process: R—STP—4P—I—C, starting with insight, planning with STP, landing with 4P, executing, and looping back with feedback;
Basic concepts (18): needs, wants, demand, market segmentation, target market, positioning, offering, brand, channels, media (paid, earned, owned), impressions, engagement, expected value, satisfaction, supply chain, competition, marketing organization, marketing environment;
Peripheral concepts (many, and forms will change): consumer profiles, product development, creativity, product concept, service, advertising, packaging, logos, public relations, promotions, delivery, distributors, terminals, traffic, scenarios, selling, interaction, after-sales, word-of-mouth, social networks, etc.
-05-
In the end, even explaining professional marketing concepts clearly is just a matter of one table.
But why do most people fail to understand it, even many industry insiders are confused?
Part of the reason is, of course, short-sightedness: they have something in hand and rush to sell it for money, unwilling to consider customer value and needs.
We often hear illogical statements like "The market lacks good products, only good marketing." Lao Miao contacts hundreds of companies each year, and truly good products are rare; most are self-serving, lacking core value, with unclear demand—"semi-finished products" or defective goods (as Teacher Zhang Liwei puts it).
No one thinks their own child is ugly; of course, they should be "loved by all, blooming like flowers."
Many people, to cater to this corporate need, appear as half-immortals, creating miracles, accomplishing the impossible, selling combs to monks.
Wanting a shortcut and ending up in a ditch is the easiest thing to happen.
The word "marketing" itself is another culprit causing widespread misunderstanding and ruining many companies and marketers.
We know "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 emphasis on dynamism.
Chinese has no present participle, so there's no exact equivalent for "Marketing"; the closest would be "market studies" or "market management."
But the original translator, for some reason, translated "Marketing" as "yingxiao" (营销), taking the meanings of "operation" and "sales," committing two fatal errors:
First, it failed to reflect the core elements of "Marketing"—"needs" and "value"—but used "operation" and "sales," easily leading marketing toward a "sales orientation."
Sales is only the transaction part of marketing. Once a company fully revolves around transactions, it will surely lose the essence and fall into the five schools I mentioned at the beginning, harming others and itself.
Second, the translation's perspective is entirely enterprise-oriented. Whether operation or sales, it's from the enterprise's viewpoint, which is a major taboo in market work; market work emphasizes customer perspective and market-oriented perspective.
If the perspective is wrong, a large number of narcissistic companies and products will emerge.
"If the name is not correct, words will not be smooth." Moreover, the word "marketing" has been severely stigmatized, leading to many bizarre phenomena:
Some skilled at hype and concept creation are called marketing masters or gods; Marketing is often associated with cheating, deception, and trickery; Marketers are imagined as selling "dog skin plasters" or "power pills"; Some exaggerated promotion and over-packaging are called "over-marketing," which is actually anti-marketing, right? Many companies avoid the word "marketing" like the plague; Duan Yongping, known for marketing, says his company values products most, not marketing; Dong Mingzhu, who rose through marketing, says her company relies on core technology and resists marketing the most; ......
-06-
Modern economics clearly includes "Marketing" in 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, enterprises have no development momentum, and the economy becomes rootless. The main reason for our weak domestic demand is the "impotence" of Marketing.
Now we advocate "internal circulation," and the leading force is still demand.
Our economic backwardness is first the backwardness of "marketing," not technology.
Harder than making chips is creating the application system for chips in 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—though technological breakthroughs are difficult, we see many catching up, some even leading. But in milk powder, cosmetics, luxury goods, even clothing and FMCG, we are always defeated.
Deng Xiaoping said "Science and technology are the primary productive forces," but in today's market economy, "Marketing is also a primary productive force."
"Marketing" is so important, but under the background of stigmatization and distortion, the cultivation of talent is also worrying.
Dr. Wang Sai said that one year, Fudan University's marketing major only recruited four students.
Those top students couldn't bear that their excellent grades led them to a major of "learning to sell 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 for marketing majors, while ordinary or even second- and third-tier colleges have marketing as a popular major.
Marketing majors lack successors and are of low quality, all due to misunderstandings of "marketing."
Marketing needs to be rehabilitated; Chinese "marketing" needs a vigorous enlightenment movement. Many experts in the industry resonate deeply with this. Last October, when Kotler came to Beijing for a summit, he brought a wave of "return to value marketing" to China.
But true marketing enlightenment requires the involvement of entrepreneurs and marketers who are personally engaged.
If everything revolves around the social problems we can truly solve, around meeting market demand, around customer-perceived value, we can avoid all the traps and schemes, see through all the charlatans, bring continuous real benefits to enterprises, and let marketers achieve true value enhancement.
Rehabilitating "marketing" and true marketing management enlightenment are of immeasurable merit and achievement. Let's encourage each other.
Source: Lao Miao Tears Marketing (ID: yiheyingxiao) Author: Xiangma Lao Miao
Tips will be paid 400-2000 yuan once adopted.