So what isn't marketable?

A purchasing manager at my first job out of school always told me “everything is negotiable”. Just after my first week of class I will add to that “everything is marketable!”

In the book Marketing Management, authors Philip Kotler and Kevin Lane Keller describe marketing as the process of “identifying and meeting human and social needs”.  Furthermore, they define marketing management as “the art and science of choosing target markets and getting, keeping, and growing customers through creating, delivering, and communicating superior customer value”. As a finance professional in the consumer goods arena I freely admit that I have viewed marketing as a function that is necessary to move product and whose results I usually see as line items on an income statement (more specifically, the expense section). I am hoping that, through this journal, the reader will see an evolutionary journey of enlightenment that not only results in me developing a greater appreciation for the marketing process, but also finds me holding an important tool that will greatly assist in the decision-making process for someone in a company’s finance department.

               

In reading the text, I wanted to share one takeaway from the opening chapter.

 Marketing people market 10 types of entites (Kotler, p. 6-7):

1.       Goods

2.       Services

3.       Events

4.       Experiences

5.       Persons

6.       Places

7.       Properties

8.       Organizations

9.       Information

10.   Ideas

My primary take away from this list: Everything is marketable!  

So, from here on, I would like to view everything with a prospective marketer’s eye and with that I will close this initial post with a fun observation.

Inserted with this past Sunday’s local newspaper was your typical brown shopping bag from Office Max with the words “20% OFF EVERYTHING YOU CAN FIT IN THIS BAG!” Was the involuntary insertion of this shopping bag into countless numbers of households a good idea? We thought it was as HP printer inkjet cartridges fit nicely into this bag (among other things we didn’t realize we needed) and 20% off isn’t that bad of a deal.  This appears to be marketing management (as defined above) at work!

I didn’t know I needed anything from the office store until this showed up at my door!