My last entry was somewhat long, so I’ll try and keep this one brief and straight to the point.
In my last post, I discussed how I believe the marketing world in the 21st century has come full circle back to what it was in the beginning. While I do believe that is true in practice, I don’t think that marketing principles have followed suit. Marketers are now providing valuable content, tools, and services just as they were when business began. But the reason is totally different. And I believe that unless we realize the proper reason for business as it was in the beginning, we will undoubtedly lose our way again.
So what do I believe is the proper purpose of business? This is probably going to sound like idealistic crap, but bear with me. Business exists to provide a service, product, or to drill it down to its most simplistic form, business provides. Business exists to fulfill a need. I believe this should be the root motivation for any business, and therefore any marketing tactic.
The problem with today’s business, and especially with today’s marketing is that people aren’t “in it” to fulfill needs, provide useful services, or help anyone. They’re in it for money. They want to be rich. They’re in it for themselves and ultimately, though it might be successful in the short term, I don’t believe building a business or marketing campaign on this principle will ever truly be successful. Business exists to fulfill a need, and when businesses don’t care about that, they fail, regardless of whether they’re making money. Anyone can take advantage of the gullibility of the human race and make a buck. The real difficulty, challenge, and fulfillment of business is to provide what people need. When you stray from that principle, you end up with, well…
Spammers. And I am being very liberal with my definition here. Spammers aren’t just the semi-crooks who send out a thousand emails per hour. Spammers are those who bid on PPC terms on MSN and send traffic to a landing page with AdSense on it. Spammers are those who spend hours optimizing domains for specific keywords, just to drive traffic to the AdSense links. Spammers are the majority of marketers. Marketers who jump on the “Viral Marketing” bandwagon because it’ll make them a buck.
Viral marketing isn’t about making a buck. It’s about helping a business be what it’s supposed to be. Marketing is simply pointing out the business to those who might need its product/service. We provide valuable content, not because people will link to it therefore bumping up our PageRank™, but because it’s valuable. Marketing has nothing to do with making a business look better, but pointing out how the business is better. If it’s not better in some way, marketing has no ethical ground to stand on.
Am I wrong? If not, then the marketing world as a whole is. And that’s huge.
