What is Marketing and the science behind it?
you must have encountered marketing in your life?
So, if I ask what do you think about marketing?
You might be thinking that marketing is all about creating advertisements, creative jingles, slogans, coming up with unique product ideas and persuading people to buy.
In short, marketing means promotion or selling to you.
But in reality, it is not true !!
Marketing is based on science and not creativity.
This sounds weird? I know it does.
But in this article, I will try to convince you that marketing is more about science and not creativity. This article is all about the basics and core fundamentals of marketing, types of marketing, what is a marketing funnel, types of the marketing funnel, digital marketing funnel, how the understanding of marketing is having an understanding of business.
So let’s break down marketing and dive into it.
What is marketing and the science behind it?
What does a bridge over sea do? It connects one side with the other side. Similarly, marketing acts as the bridge between the customer side to the product/service side (business).
Marketing is all the actions taken by a company or brand to understand customers problems, needs, wants, aspiration and dreams. Creating products, attracting customers through strong communication, building and maintaining the relationship with customers.
Marketing aims at creating value for customers or prospects by educating them and helping them out with the long term goal of demonstrating the product or service value, strengthening the brand loyalty and ultimately increasing sales.
According to Peter Drucker:
“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself. It makes selling superfluous.”
What does that mean?
Marketing is not about who can sell better who can pay more for advertisements. But it is about the deep psychological understanding of customers needs. Let’s take the example of Amazon’s founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.
The secret behind Amazon’s success in India is his understanding of the market and what his customers want. He came up with the concept of cash on delivery which was the requirement of Indian customers.
He was not focused on just selling more than competitors but his focus was on creating customer value by simplifying their life.
He is one of the richest person on this earth. It is just the by-product of the value that he has given to his customers.
Marketing is not about having a product and service then trying to sell and promote it.
Marketing starts even before creating a product. It starts with understanding the customer need that leads to creating a product and have a market fit.
If you are able to create such a product that has a product-market fit, solves customer’s problem then it is very easy to sell that product without a lot of efforts.
That’s why it is said that marketing is based on science and not on creativity.
What is the purpose of marketing in business?
“Business has only two functions-marketing and innovations”
~Milan Kundera
Any business out there is just for the sake of solving a customer’s problem or taking them from their current state to desired state and the core fundamental of marketing is to understand customer needs.
Understanding the customer needs and then finding an innovative vision to deliver it.
Marketing starts before creating a product, marketing is there when you sell, marketing is there, after you sell your product or service to your customer so that you can encourage them to buy more products or service from you in future.
Marketing is not just about selling. It is also about keeping existing customers happy by communicating with them so that they remain a customer for life and become brand advocates for you.
Basically, marketing is there in every step of a business. So business and marketing intersect with each other and act as crime partners together.
“Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department”
~ David Packard
Many entrepreneurs and business owners think marketing is something that can be outsourced to a marketing agency.
Their business fails because they end up making a product that does not have a market fit and then they depend on marketers to push that product.
But as we know that marketing starts with understanding the customers and developing a product that fits the customer needs so much that the product or service sells itself.
According to Philip Kotler:
Marketing’s key processes are:
- Opportunity identification
- New product development
- Customer attraction
- Customer retention and loyalty building
- Order fulfilment.
A company or brand that handles all these processes well normally enjoy success. But when a company fails at any one of these processes, it will not survive.
This increases the importance of marketers to fine-tune how a business sells a product to consumers to optimise success.
So for me, understanding marketing is understanding business.
Good marketing vs bad marketing
I just hate advertisements.
And I m 100% sure that you are also someone who feels irritated when you are disturbed with unskippable youtube ads while consuming content, banner ads while you are searching for something on the internet, irrelevant newspaper ads, tv commercials, people cold calling you and trying to sell you something that you have never ever heard of, etc.
What do you think how many ads do you encounter in a day?
10? Or 100? 0r 1000?
The answer is
According to a study an average person encounters between 6,000 to 10,000 ads every single day.
This has lead to ad blindness. We know that it is an ad so we just don’t give attention.
Most of the marketing is ineffective pushing, and that’s the stuff that we as consumers are tuning out. Promotion and propaganda don’t work in today’s world.
It’s all ego-driven marketing tactics.
Don’t you think that it is bad marketing?
Now, let’s take an example. You might have observed that you chat with your friend on Facebook about planning a trip to goa and suddenly you start seeing ads with discounted offers.
And you believe that it is such a coincidence but it is just marketing. we only love to interact with things that are relevant to us.
Marketing is about sending the right message to the right person at the right time.
It is a better and effective way of marketing.
Secondly, every business is started in order to solve a customer problem. But as the company or brand grows the focus shifts from customer to revenue.
Good marketing or marketing that works is focused on customer’s needs and customer’s satisfaction. It is about telling stories and not selling products.
We as a customer would love to tune into brands and content that helps us. So businesses need to get back to the roots and should create content that customer would love to read and share.
Content marketing should be treated as the process of solving customers problems.
Your brand is more than what you sell !!
Only that business wins which solves customer pain points along their buyer journey.
Marketing has a marketing problem
Marketing is a game of perception and the product is rooted in reality. Never let marketing become more important than the product.
Many marketers try to use marketing skills to promote and sell low-quality products. This does not match the core fundamentals of marketing.
They just focus on marketing rather than the quality of the product itself and over a period of time people will come to know that your product is not good then all the efforts in marketing will get wasted.
A bad product with good marketing will accelerate the death of your product or service.
So the main focus should be on understanding the customer’s needs and then creating a great product. marketing is just the kick starter, once the momentum is built you will not require it much.
Once you get a customer through good marketing make them happy with your product. A great product converts your customers into brand ambassadors.
Word of mouth marketing is the best type of marketing ever. people trust the word of mouth referral more in time and age.
Marketing and Communication
Good marketing is all about good communication. It is a conversation between two people who don’t know each other.
A great conversation leads to understanding needs and then using this understanding to conceptualise a product according to needs and then delivering it while engaging with each other and building a relationship.
As this conversation gets deep the relationship gets stronger and it builds trust. Like human relationships, the business that does deep conversations and connections are the ones who seem to care more about the other person than they do about themselves.
Only that businesses get successful that keeps their customer ahead of their desire to sell more products. They just don’t act as they care but they actually care and they prove it in the way they act.
They want to help their customer by heart to improve their lives through their content, expertise, passion, and through the products they sell.
When given a choice, we only buy from brands we know, like and trust!
Types of Marketing
Marketing campaigns for your brands or business totally depends on where your customers or prospects spend their time or which platform they use. on the basis of that marketing can be divided into two parts offline and online.
Offline or traditional marketing includes: newspaper ads, tv ads, radio ads, magazine ads, billboards etc
Whereas digital marketing includes: SEO, paid ads, social media etc
Most businesses use a combination of offline and online marketing methods. However, these days the balance is shifting more towards online or internet marketing. This is because of customer behaviour change as they are spending more and more time online. So digital marketing becomes more effective in terms of reaching them online with better ROI, efficiency and understanding of customer behaviour.
What is a marketing funnel and why it is needed?
You need to understand that the purchase process is a journey. It is a journey that the buyer or customer goes through before purchasing any product. It is called a buyer’s journey.
And marketing funnel is the breaking down of customer’s journey all the way from the awareness stage when they get to know about the business till the purchase stage when they are ready to buy your product or service.
The most common types of marketing funnel have four steps and is commonly known as AIDA:
- Attention: A prospective customer sees your ad, social media post, or hear about you from a friend.
- Interest: They think you can solve a problem and wants to learn more.
- Desire: The prospect has done their research and wants to convert.
- Action: The prospect takes action — they buy your item, schedule a demo, or take whatever other action you want them to take.
Therefore AIDA model in marketing says that Awareness leads to Interest, which leads to Desire, and finally Action.
It is called a funnel because the number of people gets filtered out. Everyone gets inside from the top of the funnel but only interested buyers can go down the funnel. you can track customer’s journey according to different stages in the funnel.
Many businesses do not understand customers journey. They don’t understand the value of marketing funnels.
But today it is very important to make a marketing funnel because scarce resource out there is “TRUST”. We don’t purchase anything until we have trust.
Just imagine we end up watching shitty movies recommended by our friends, purchasing something that is recommended by our relatives or known people. And the funny part is later we regret it but still repeat it.
The logic is simple: we have trust in them.
That’s why marketing is based on science.
Marketing is a game of building trust with a lot of people at the same time. So as a marketer your #1 goal should be to build trust with your target audience and you need to understand the importance of funnel.
Funnels are vital to the success of any business. If you want to consistently and systematically generate leads for your business, a funnel is a must!
There are other types of marketing funnels:
- Sales funnels
- Webinar funnels
- CATT funnel
- Email funnels
- Video marketing funnels
- Lead magnet funnels
CATT Marketing Funnel and Framework
It is the marketing funnel that works brilliantly for the digital marketing space.
According to the CATT funnel which is a power formula:
Wealth= n^CATT
The amount of wealth created at the end of the funnel depends on 5 factors: niche, content, attention, trust, and transaction.
[n] Niche: it is the step in which you decide that which market you will target to solve customer’s problem by your product or service.
Don’t be a jack of all trades instead master one trade.
[c] Content: As discussed earlier main focus of marketing is understanding of the customer. So you need to create content that is useful for your target audience and solves their problem.
You can create value for customers by creating blog posts that educate them, videos, lead magnets, live webinars, etc
[A] Attention: Driving attention or traffic to your content using various methods like search engine optimisation (SEO), social media, paid ads, referrals.
The customer gets to know about your brand in this step.
[T] Trust: ones you get the attention you need to build trust with your audience with tripwires, email marketing which involves personalised communication, retargeting etc.
This step is crucial because without building trust you can get your prospects to buy.
ones the trust is build-up now comes the most important step
[T] Transaction: converting leads or prospects into customers.
This completes the funnel and gives the byproduct of the value you created which is wealth.
Conclusion:
Marketing is “the” most important factor in any business whether it is a small business or a large organisation. It intersects with all the areas of business, so it is important for you to have a better understanding of marketing to increase business’s efficiency and success.
Hope you got a better understanding of marketing and got convinced that marketing is more about science and not creativity.
What is your perspective on marketing? Let me know in the comments.
Thanks for reading this post. If you feel informative you can share with your friends and please subscribe to my newsletter.
Cheers,
Abhijeet
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