The beauty of strategic marketing is that if you get it right, you don’t need to do the ‘hard sell’. In fact, if your strategic marketing is right, there’s much less need for operational marketing. As Peter Drucker famously said, ‘The purpose of marketing is to make selling superfluous’.

Strategic marketing is not something that can be added on at the end. It must permeate the whole business, from start to finish, from top to bottom. Strategic marketing is about designing and developing a business with customers in mind at all times. It is not a separate function; it is a fundamental business philosophy.

In contrast, for people who think the word marketing merely means ‘selling’, marketing activity comes last. This is often the case in unsuccessful businesses. They make a product without thinking about the market and then they end up with the problem of selling it. They engage sales people and adopt expensive advertising techniques. They build a whole new ‘marketing department’ to try and sell products. In other words, they see marketing as a bolt on to the business.

The strategic marketing approach I advocate takes a different view. It’s a philosophy that marketing is about aligning the whole business around the changing needs of selected customers. This is what David Packard meant in his well-known quote, ‘Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.’

If I could offer businesses just one piece of marketing advice it would be this: deal with strategic marketing issues first. It’s only when the business is correctly designed around the needs of selected customers that we should consider operational marketing techniques.

Key Points

Strategic marketing is about the business as a whole and its design and development around the changing needs of selected customers. It is not a separate department or final stage in the process.

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