[Marketing Defined is part one in a series of blogs that will summarize a presentation I delivered at the Northwest Arkansas Marketing Summit on September 20th concerning using technology to grow your business.]

I’m convinced that when most companies think of marketing, what they really mean is advertising.  Television or radio commercials and bill boards or ads in a industry or local magazine are normally what they have in mind.  The goal is to distribute awareness of your product or service to as many people as possible with the assumption that a small minority will respond.  Ideally, this small minority will offset the total cost of the campaign, which will generate more profits, which will be spent on bigger and better advertising.  This cycle can actually work for a while but is neither sustainable nor practical long-term.

Real marketing, on the other hand, is better defined as identifying the particular wants and needs of a target market of customers, and then going about satisfying those customers better than the competitors.

In 1993, before most of us had even heard of the Internet, Don Peppers and Martha Rogers wrote an exciting book where they coined the term one-to-one marketing.

They described marketing as a four phase process:

1. Identifying potential customers
2. Determining their needs and their lifetime value to the company
3. Interacting with the customer so as to learn about them
4. Customizing products, services, and communications to individual customers.

If marketing is about knowing your customers, interacting with them on a regular basis, and then customizing your products and services to meet their needs then technology makes marketing possible!

I'll dig into the presumptions above in more detail as I continue this series with the following postings:

Web 1.0: Old Habits Die Hard
Web 2.0: It’s All About Me
Web 3.0: The Simple Life
Four Ways We Should Be Utilizing Technology to Grow Our Brand