Everyone Has a Marketing Strategy

By Kyle McCabe | October 13, 2009

If you own, manage or work in a business, you’re a marketer. Marketing may not be your specialty – that is, you may not be the one calling the shots when it comes to marketing plans and decisions, but you are still an integral part of that activity. You are a marketer, like it or not.

Don’t think so? Think clear back to a time when (generally) a “market” meant a place in town where booths, shops and carts were set up to sell meats, produce, and other goods. That’s marketing at its most basic: a presence in the marketplace.

Bear with me, now, as I try to connect some dots.

Humans, by their very nature, are goal-seeking. We can’t escape it. Since we have goals, we also have strategies. Without thinking we form strategies and implement tactics to achieve objectives. From our perspective it seems like we’re just washing dishes or running errands, but the processes behind these actions relate to our goals. It’s automatic. It’s human nature.

The fishmonger had a marketing strategy, though he probably didn’t know it. In fact it’s debatable whether anyone really “knew” about marketing strategies until the 20th century. They existed nonetheless, good and bad – unexamined.

Everyone can agree that marketing is an inherent component of business. In fact, it’s so fundamental that you actually “do” marketing simply by having a storefront (offline or on).

Since you can’t escape “doing” marketing, and since you are a goal-seeking human, you already have a marketing strategy whether you can identify it or not. It may have been created by someone else in your organization, or it may simply be composed of various ideas you’ve encountered throughout your career, or from interaction with colleagues. It may or may not be a good strategy. Either way, you’re using it.

But the quality of that strategy really is the question. Given that most of the activities you engage in for business fall under the category “marketing” (many of them indirectly), it’s probably a good idea to take a hard look at those activities as a collective and consider whether or not the totality of your efforts is furthering your business goals.

After all, we’ve come a long way from village-square peddlers. Everything has changed: the basic economy, currency, range of customers, type and range of goods and services, the scope and scale of everything…marketing in a modern economy is much more complex. It takes multiple people, sometimes a large staff of just marketing folks. It takes strategy – well researched and articulated.

You have a marketing strategy. Ask yourself if it’s effective or not. Track data. Measure results. Refine your plan. Just don’t leave it up to chance.

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Photo credit: frli

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