I spent some time in marketing and marketing-related functions. However, my experience is in consumer and high-tech marketing. Within industrial automation my experience is either user or sales engineer (OK, maybe the engineer part is a euphemism). Sometimes I chat with other editors about marketing in the automation arena. One or two has industrial marketing experience. We recognize that there are a few good industrial marketers, but there are many who could learn much by studying the consumer and high-tech marketers.
One guy I read is Doc Searls, one of the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto (more on that in a future post). Here is a post on marketing in the "Web 2.0" era. Has much applicability to all the readers of this blog. He is quoting from this blog.
What marketing becomes is not all that different from what it should have been all along...just take a look at what Peter Drucker said during the last three quarter century:
"Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two--and only two--basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business."
"The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself."
"The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn't said."
"Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it."
And hopefully, what marketing becomes will also be heavily influenced by other disciplines besides technology -- including sociology, anthropology, politics, economics, science, and others. Some of the "field-specific" innovations have come from seemingly unrelated fields. Again, Drucker has a good example of that: "The new approaches to the study of history have, for instance, come out of economics, psychology and archeology, all disciplines that historians never considered relevant to their field and to which they had rarely before been exposed.... By itself, specialized knowledge yields no performance."
That last line is a killer.
Note: Web 2.0 is a phrase batted around the blogosphere regarding Web marketing in the post-Internet Bust era. I just saw someone refer to Web 3.0 <sigh>.
5:35:22 PM 
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